From the beginning, though, it found fans among writers and artists. The strip ran from 1913 until 1944, the year that Herriman died. The structure of the strip was built on reversals: a cat loves a mouse, a dog protects a feline, and, at a time when anti-miscegenation laws held sway in most of the United States, a black animal yearns for a white one. Creoles who could pass but did not try to were called passé blanc. In adulthood, Herriman frequently covered his tight curls with a hat, and invented fanciful origin stories that attributed his light brown skin to years living under the sun of Greece. Sometimes he claimed that his ancestors were French or Irish—anything that might sow confusion. When Krazy is portrayed as male, the comic becomes the story of one male character openly pining for another—in some touching scenes, the characters even nestle together to sleep. In his autobiography, the director Frank Capra described a conversation he had with Herriman on the subject. Herriman, Capra tells us, lit his pipe before answering. I fooled around with it once; began to think the Kat is a girl—even drew up some strips with her being pregnant. So we declared Krazy a girl cat, and that was that! Assuming that Krazy was exclusively female was a common response. In a 1946 reflection on the comic, E. A well-known bohemian bar in Washington, D. Its sign featured a black cat that resembled Krazy being hit by a brick. Not to offend him, I said, Any one which you like sir, or all three should you rather have it that way. Nearly a century later, perhaps as much has changed as not. He invoked the epochal 1910 fight between the African-American boxer Jack Johnson and the white boxer James Jeffries; when Johnson knocked out Jeffries, race riots followed. Herriman covered the match in newspaper cartoons. As a trans woman who, like Herriman, is multiracial, the strip spoke to me in unexpected ways. To transition into the gender you know yourself to be can sometimes feel like learning a language you remember from an old dream—a mother tongue from a shadowy land, a language at once easy and alien. Identity is not something you suddenly excavate in full, like a buried chest; you gradually learn the vernaculars and multitudes you may contain, whether or not you wish to know them. That Krazy keeps dreaming of love, even when faced with an absurd, cruel world, is endearing. But Krazy can also be wise, like Sancho Panza, and admirable. Krazy is a kind of Whitmanesque symbol for the malleability of the self, one that surely provided an outlet for Herriman. Seeking a world that represented the liberty he felt denied, Herriman created a powerful, if perhaps too-little acknowledged, addition to the canon of queer American literature. © 2018 Condé Nast. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products and services that are purchased through links on our site as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers.
