Tarzan’s Twin Cities Adventure

by David Benjamin

“In the colonial countries… the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force.”
— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

MADISON, Wis. — Whenever I see that photo of Derek Chauvin glaring malignantly into the camera and crushing George Floyd beneath his knee, the feature that strikes me is that the cop’s arms are so skinny. Here’s a guy, I think, who never milked a Minnesota cow, drove a rig or unloaded a boxcar. Here’s a white man whose full claim to muscle is institutional authority. Chauvin comes off as supremely cocksure because he knows that the impersonal State has his back. With his steely stare and hand on hip, he’s saying, “Look at me and despair, peasants, as I nonchalantly ride the bull neck of a giant Black buck almost twice my size who, in a fair fight, would pound me senseless. I am untouchable. ”

Of course, I also summon up Tarzan memories. More accurately, I think about Tarzan’s clients, Great White Hunters (GWH) slumming among the Hottentots and foreshadowing Derek Chauvin’s safari into darkest Minneapolis. Those bygone adventurers, protected by the colonial conquerors who knelt on Africa’s neck for more than a century, were outsiders from the faraway white “suburbs” of Belgium, France, Britain and Germany. Without Tarzan’s help, they could never hope to find untold fortune in the elephants’ graveyard, or the gold fields of Kilimanjaro, or the secret jewels of the Juju queen. They, too, had skinny arms and they didn’t know the territory. What they did have was official authority. And guns.

Among all the weird superheroes who’ve come down to us from pulp fiction, comic books and the movies, Tarzan might be the weirdest of all — a white jungle monarch in a Black continent. He had to be white because, in the Jim Crow America where Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote his stories, where Hollywood turned Tarzan into a movie franchise, few readers or filmgoers would have tolerated the notion of a Negro protagonist. In the jungles of West Africa where he holds unchallenged sway over chimpanzees, gorillas, elephants, various other herbivores and, most significantly, “natives,” Tarzan’s dominion validates Anglo-Saxon heritage as a prerequisite for executive management.

It’s possibly a sign of social progress that the word “natives” nowadays looks better in quotation marks. I memorized this formulation largely through my exposure to Tarzan at the Erwin Theater. In Hollywood parlance, an African in Africa was a “native.” The term, which I never thought pejorative (I was a little kid), bestowed a a sort of ass-backwards indulgence on the dwellers of the “dark” continent. Plant a Black person anywhere else and society applied less decorous labels.

Tarzan had to be white, because his GWH clients needed a fellow Caucasian as the trusted interlocutor between them and the gibbering, skittish natives. Never mind that Johnny Weismuller’s ape man had an English vocabulary only slightly larger than that of Cheeta the chimp. Had Tarzan been Black — and as articulate as, say, Jane (or Frederick Douglass) — he would have been deemed incredible both by the GWHs in the story and a movie-house crowd conditioned to Black speech by Butterfly McQueen and Stepin Fetchit. Had Tarzan been Black, cohabiting out of wedlock in a treehouse with Maureen O’Sullivan, a half-caste son and an intelligent monkey, there would have been crosses burning in front of the Rialto and race riots inside the Bijou.

Fortunately, when MGM released Tarzan and His Mate in 1934, there was no one in the audience who might challenge the sacred principle of white rule. In film after film, without a peep from moviegoers, Tarzan presided over a repeated scene that cinematically augured the death of George Floyd.

In your typical Tarzan flick, the explorers — plus Tarzan and Jane (in her peekaboo buckskin bikini) — are the only white faces in a throng of native bearers. Suddenly, the bearers are afraid to go on. They’ve been spooked by fear of the mountain god, or the river elves or the mythic Leopard People, or by some other comical Negroid superstition. The white hunter, thin, professorial and smooth-shaven except for a pencil mustache, decked out in pressed khakis and pith helmet, waxes angry at native initiative. He menaces the quaking, cowering bearers with his rifle.

“Pick up the load, Pompey — or else!” he roars, in English, to the biggest, blackest native. Tarzan stands by, looking sympathetic toward Pompey but not intervening (much like the crowd on 38th Street in Minneapolis). Jane clutches Tarzan’s rippling but inert arm and looks anxious (but also delectable).

Eventually, the mutinous native utters an oath in Negroese. He spins on his heel and proceeds to desert the safari. The GHW shouts, “Oh no you don’t, you black devil!” He promptly squeezes his trigger, plugs Pompey neatly in the back and, consequently, brings the rest of the bearers to heel — at least until the attack of the Leopard People (who turn out to be real). White rule, however, has been validated by virtue of superior weaponry and the passivity of moral bystanders.

Segue back to real life in the present, where the remarkable jury verdict against Derek Chauvin suggests that the code of the Great White Hunter might have finally fallen out of vogue. Perhaps the principle of indispensable pallor — notwithstanding the the shrill chauvinism of Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and the “America First Caucus” — is in danger.

Or maybe not. Derek Chauvin’s crime was committed publicly with no intervention by other authority, while a crowd of ambivalent Tarzans and Janes looked on, uncomfortably. The sheer banality of this outrage seems to suggest that Chauvin and his fellow cops haven’t much evolved beyond the condescending racism and visceral fear of the “natives” embodied by the greedy ivory poachers of Tarzan and His Mate.

After all, I suspect, this prosecution was a black swan poised to fly south. And when they make the movie, Brad Pitt will be cast as George Floyd… and he won’t die after all.