City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California

Chapter 14: Performing His Whiteness

215  14 Performing His Whiteness Personality is a mirage maintained by conceit and custom, without metaphysical foundation or visceral reality. —Jorge Luis Borges, “The Nothingness of Personality” Jim scheduled a September 13, 1983, meeting with Lucilla Rowlett and her husband at the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge in Leesville, Louisiana. In the course of that meeting, he paid her the first of two 1,000-dollar bribes. Rowlett tape-recorded the conversation with a voice-activated Nagra recorder that the FBI had put into her purse. The transcripts of this and subsequent recordings would help the prosecution clinch its case against Jim. They also showed his desperate bid to keep her loyalty. To do so, he resorted to a personal cultural technology, the one he had inherited from his father: he tried to behave like an authentic son of the south, an identity performance he assumed that would score points with Rowlett. Jim started his homecoming dinner with small talk intended to establish his Louisiana credentials. He offered to cover the dinner and drinks and played the doting father, patiently quizzing Rowlett about what she liked on the menu and then thoughtfully bringing her up to date on their old friends at the bank. With feigned interest, Jim listened to Donald, her husband (also known as Dwayne), talk about his plans to run several hotdog stands. Then he tried to patronize Rowlett outright. Playing on her pride, he acknowledged how much her corner of Louisiana had progressed and how he would gladly give up all his wealth and possessions to live the simple, worry-free life that she had wisely chosen for herself.1 215 216 city of industry Next, Jim tried to spin a funny story about a dear friend. According to him, Vincent Perez, who enjoyed a monopoly over the city’s waste disposal and industrial recycling business (thanks to Jim), had an excellent ear for black speech. “Did you ever hear him get started on them?” Jim asked. One digression deserved another. Rowlett, trying to show that she had not lost the thread of his story, knowingly declared, “He was in Soap.” She blundered on. “Remember when he was in Soap?” mistakenly confusing Perez with Benson, the sardonic butler played by Robert Guillaume in the 1970s television satire. “No, no,” Jim interjected. “Vincent Perez. I’m talking about Vincent Perez. Don’t you know Vincent Perez?” His exasperation began to show when he realized that Rowlett had failed to follow his story. “No, I never knew him,” she answered timidly. “I thought you were talking about the show on television.” “Oh no. No, no, no.” We can imagine Jim at that moment trying to hide his disappointment with a smile but wondering how she could have treated him with such deference for so many those years without knowing all of his closest associates? Rowlett’s error suggests that she might have been preoccupied with asking her scripted questions. But Jim did not see her inattention as suspicious and pressed on. Perez had a talent for mimicking black speech, perhaps imitations of the Amos ’n’ Andy locutions performed by white radio actors for audiences of his generation. Jim explained his admiration: he was impressed that a Spanish immigrant could master that accent and dialect. Perez’s ferocious urge to ridicule black speech also amused him. Here, after all, was an outsider candid and honest enough to confirm what other whites were afraid to admit. Jim now believed he was doing Rowlett the same favor, repeating, with a wink and a nod, a white-supremacist narrative that any red-blooded southerner must naturally enjoy. “You remember CORE, C-O-R-E?” Jim asked, referring to a major organization of the civil rights movement. “Yeah,” she answered. “That was one of their first big pushes,” he continued, showing surprising awareness of a movement for which he had little regard as well as a sense of relief at not having lost Rowlett’s attention. Apparently, CORE had sent Jim an envelope “in the mail one day, you know, [and addressed it] something like, Dear Friend of CORE. Please send us anything you can afford, from a dollar on up. Do you hire any colored people? What’s your performing his whiteness 217 name and address? Things like that.” Here the tape recording becomes unintelligible until Jim says, “We filled the damn thing out and we put Vincent’s...