Angry Black White Boy (12 page)

Macon woke up, stiff and disoriented, to the metal-on-metal scrape of his cell door opening.

“Detornay,” a hatchet-faced guard said. “Let’s go. You made bail.”

“No shit,” muttered Macon, swinging his legs to the floor and knuckling the crust out of his eyes. He followed the guard down the hall, buttoning his shirt as he walked.

“Paperwork’s all taken care of,” said the desk officer. “Sign here.” Macon signed.

He walked out of the station and into a different life. Megawatt flashbulbs exploded, leaving shooting-star trails singed on Macon’s eyes; he blinked through them and saw an antic stroboscopic collage of heavy grated chrome news station microphones and numbers, a lysergic-demetholated
Sesame Street
pastiche,
today’s show
was brought to you by the numbers,
five four seven two one dip-wave-diving at him, connected by gyrating pink, black, green, and flesh-colored reporters’ arms. Huge white gleaming television mouths and cigarette-stained print media teeth, enormous boom mics hanging in the air like evil bumblebees, and all of it drowned in poreless cacophony, no register of human voice depth unfilled: shrieking soprano alto baritone questions, tenor bass questions, undifferentiated voices clenching and unclenching. Macon stood, baffled, and let it wash over and into and around him, and the clock ticked two, three, four, five times, and even as he realized that they’d never stop, never hush even if he stood silent like an invalid for minutes, he began to understand words, focus on shrill individual sentences. The frequency of the flashbulbs slowed.

“Macon!” clamored sixty vying voices.

“Will you comment on the charges, Macon?”

“Did you know they thought you were black?”

“How does it feel to be the most notorious New Yorker since Bernhard Goetz, Macon?”

“Are white people evil, Macon?”

“Why did you pretend to be black?”

“Who paid your bail, Macon?”

A ripple through the throng caught his eye. Boom mics swayed, reporters pitched forward on high heels and reached out their talons to clamp on to someone or something for support. The ripple amplified and the cluster ruptured down the middle and Andre pushed his way through like a defensive linesman, crouching low, with Nique behind him. Macon watched, entranced. When Andre broke into the clear and opened his arms, Macon half-expected to be quarterback-sacked.

Instead, Andre wrapped him in a bear hug. “Yo, man!” he said, mouth to ear. “You all right?”

“Don’t answer anything these fools ask,” said Nique, his arms around them both. “Leave everything to me.”

Nique turned to the media and threw up his hands like Richard Nixon. “Ladies and gentlemen of the press, if any,” he said, and Macon looked up, shocked at the silence. “Please allow me to present Mr. Macon Detornay, a young man whose stunning honesty, intelligence, and courage in addressing the question of race in these United States make him one of our most valuable new thinkers.”

He rotated slowly as he spoke, letting the three hundred degrees of cameras, microphones, and recorders immortalize his every goddamn word just like they should. “At this time,” Nique went on, “Macon cannot answer any questions pertaining to his legal situation.” Andre watched the smooth curve of Nique’s dome and surged with confidence and glee, thinking of all the public relations courses his boy had aced. “Any inappropriate questions,” Nique continued, raising a finger in warning, “and we’re out of here.”

Macon grabbed him by the shoulder and spun Nique around. “What the hell are you doing?” he whispered fiercely.

“I knew it was you, dude.” Nique grinned, clasping Macon back. “I fucking knew it.”

“Maybe you didn’t hear me.” The hum of reportage was cresting again. “I asked you what the hell you were doing.”

“You’re full-blown, dog,” Nique responded. “Front page of the
Post
today—‘Visible Man,’ with a picture. Lead story on local TV last night, and the networks mentioned you, too. Motherfuckers want to kill you and elect you mayor. You’re the New Radicalism. You’re what happens when white people listen to hip hop, according to KRS-One on the
Times
op-ed page. Mad kids are loving you on some revolutionary Robin Hood shit. You talk, the fuckin’ country listens. So talk, goddammit. And don’t worry about prison. I’ve got everything worked out.”

Macon wanted to believe it, so he did. “KRS said that?” he asked, heart quickening at the mention of his one-time idol.

“Uh-huh.” Nique wrapped an arm around Macon’s back and pushed him toward the spotlight. Another frenzy of lights and questions ended when Macon opened his mouth. He felt fate hanging strange and heavy in the air, as if he’d been barreling toward this moment his entire life without quite knowing it. He turned toward the array of microphones and took a deep breath, savoring the focused silence.

“I want to talk about white people.”

Behind him, Nique smiled and clenched his fist. A killer opening. Macon was good. The possibilities were endless.

“Like you?” shouted a reporter, eliciting light laughter. Nique menaced the dude with a finger and he cowered.

Macon nodded, astounded at his own serenity. The stress headache, the grime of jail, were gone. He gazed calmly into the throng, thought, Yes, this makes perfect sense, and felt his heart thump an amen. Yes. I will talk and they will listen. Ready or not, motherfuckers, here I come.

He nodded again. “Right. Like me. I want to talk about white people because if I expose them for what they are, maybe they’ll change. Or at least change the way they act. Seems like embarrassment’s the only thing that works. Black folks are just lucky they happened to be sitting at Southern lunch counters at the same time that Third World liberation and the Cold War forced a change in U.S. domestic policy so we didn’t look like slave masters compared to the Russians, and capitalism could win a few more territories on the Dark Continent.” He noticed a reporter scribbling frantically, and realized he was talking two-point-two kilometers a minute.

Macon paused to let those unfortunate enough to be without recording technology catch halfway up. He’s loving this, thought Andre from the sidelines, with equal parts elation and resentment. All Macon’s faults were virtues in this setting. The crippling self-awareness. The insecurity. The dueling desires to offend and please. As soon as he stopped talking, there was another ruckus of questions and waving hands. Macon ignored it, stood for a moment lost in thought, and then continued at his leisure.

“The funny thing is, though, who am I exposing white people to? It ain’t news to black folks that whites are still racist. I guess I’m exposing white people to themselves. We’ve gotten so good at pretending we’re not racist that we’ve started to believe it. We act like racism got dealt with back in the sixties, and treat anybody who dares to bring it up today like they’re wearing Day-Glo bell-bottoms or something. We teach our kids the doctrine of color blindness, tell them not to notice race. Which is impossible in a society as racially stratified as ours, so all they really learn is not to talk about it. To ignore it and deny it like their parents.”

Macon stopped and cracked his knuckles, and the press went ballistic again. Nique stepped in front of the throng: “Hands, people, hands!” They complied and Nique scanned the knot like a kid at recess deciding who to draft onto his kickball team. He grinned and called on the reporter with the biggest breasts. “Yolanda Prince, Channel Four Action News.”

She flashed a smile at him and Nique winked, blew her a kiss, and slid back into freeze-frame. “Macon,” said Yolanda, “how does a white kid from an affluent suburb end up with such disdain for white people?”

Macon laughed indulgently, impressing himself with the gesture’s generosity. “You just answered your own question. Where I’m from is so insulated and complacent that I think the real question is why more people don’t freak out and get like me. And you know what? I think plenty of white people do know deep down that they’re part of an evil system, and they learn not to think about it, because it would disrupt their lives. We’re very short on courage.”

Yolanda wasn’t satisfied. “But you personally,” she pressed. “What makes you—”

Macon nodded and cut her off. “Right, right. The puzzle piece you’re looking for is hip hop. That’s what led me not only to make friends with black people, but to hang out in black communities. Most white people, even if they have black friends, never expose themselves to any situation that will make them feel uncomfortable or like the minority. Me, I feel uncomfortable if I’m not the minority. I even get suspicious when I see other white folks poking around black culture.”

Andre ground his teeth until his jaw flared. Well, bully for you, he thought.

Next to him, Nique smirked: Trap-laying motherfucker. Float them a whiff of paradox and watch them salivate.

“But Macon, isn’t that hypocritical?” shouted Dale Kinsley of the WB 11
News at Ten.

“Of course,” said Macon easily, catching the question like a rubber ball he’d just bounced off a building. “You’ll find I’m highly hypocritical. Part of me believes we’re all the same, and part of me believes in every racist fairy tale I’ve ever heard, even the ones that contradict the other ones. I’ll look at a black kid standing on a street corner and part of me will decide that he’s probably some undiscovered, disadvantaged genius, and want to step in and help him turn his life around like in one of those dumb-ass ohthank-you-mister-white-man movies. And at the same time, another part of me will look at him and see a menace, a drug dealer, somebody who probably hates me, and want to cross the street to get away from him. And part of me knows that my fear is really guilt, because there are X number of reasons why he’s standing on that street corner and I’m not, and I feel like he has the right to hate me for reaping the rewards of a system that excludes him— even more so since I’m aware of it. And another part rejects all that and gets self-righteous about the whole thing, like ‘It’s his fault, he’s where he deserves to be.’ Even though for all I know the guy’s just waiting for his grandmother to begin with.

“Meanwhile, another part of me is busy blaming you guys, the media, for feeding me so many images of black people as violent criminals that I can’t shake them all. Then there’s the part that wants more than anything in the world for that kid to nod hello, because that would validate me, make me feel for a minute like I’m not white, not different from him, not responsible for his oppression, or like I’m cool enough to get this murderous gangster thug’s respect.

“And meanwhile, another part is busy reassuring me that I am cool, reminding me of all my black friends, and resenting this kid for treating me like just another white dude, not realizing how down with black people I really am. And right next to that is the part that remembers how I once watched a crew of white kids jump a black kid after a pickup basketball game and bust his face open and piss on him and call him every kind of nigger, and I did nothing, didn’t say one word. I didn’t even call an ambulance. So don’t expect anything coherent to come out of my mouth. I’m struggling with this. I do know one thing, though: I’m finished being quiet.”

Macon paused and the throng tightened their grips around the necks of their microphones and waited. His burst of honesty had turned the professionally aggressive newspeople docile. Those who’d covered traffic accidents felt a familiar, wincing sense of fascination. Macon was hauling out the bodies, his own the bloodiest of all. The reporters didn’t know if they were watching a clever zealot, whose wide-eyed veneer disguised incredible instincts for emotional manipulation, or the unwitting self-annihilation of a mentally deranged kid.

“All I know,” Macon went on, making his voice low and serious, “is that even the most concerned white people have always been able to back away from race—and alter their perceptions in amazing ways when the truth is too ugly or complicated.” Nique poked him sharply in the back, signaling that Macon was wandering too close to self-incrimination, and Macon took the hint and redirected. “We’ve got to handcuff white people to race and not let them loose no matter how much they scream,” he concluded. “Treat them like they were kicking heroin.”

Hands shot up and Nique selected a fly, straight-haired blonde, despite her AM news station’s obscurity.

“What would you tell other white kids like yourself, Macon? Will hip hop do for them what it did for you?”

Macon blushed at the hint of flattery embedded in the question. “Probably not,” he said. “There’s a lot more to it than that. There are millions of white kids listening to hip hop already—more white kids than black kids, actually—and I doubt it’s changing their fundamental ideas about race. Plenty of white kids have their little hip hop phase, and they don’t all turn conscious any more than all Pink Floyd fans become acidheads. Hip hop’s not some magical elixir, it’s just a doorway. And nowadays, it probably reinforces more stereotypes than it breaks.”

He paused, and wagged a finger at the nearest camera. “All you white kids out there who like hip hop,” he said, “keep in mind that hip hop doesn’t need you—I mean us. Maybe you should leave it alone. No, wait, keep listening to it but don’t try to rap. No, all right, buy it but don’t listen to it. No, okay, you can do whatever you want, just be respectful and realize that you’re not who it’s for—well, at this point, maybe you are who it’s for, but you didn’t create it and your people are exploiting it like they have every other . . .” Macon trailed off, snarled in his thoughts. “See, that’s the problem,” he said. “You’re only gonna put me on the news for thirty seconds, right? I’m supposed to distill everything into a sound bite, and I’m no good at that. This stuff is too complex; we need to be talking about it morning, noon, and night. I’m down for that, if anybody wants to join me.”

Nique tapped him on the shoulder and Macon leaned back and listened as he whispered something. Macon smiled, straightened. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s a sound bite. White people aren’t evil, but evil is white people. Coming soon to a T-shirt near you.”