Angry Black White Boy (17 page)

“Give me a call,” Alam said, reaching up to pat Macon on the forearm as Andre edged The Franchise away. “We’ll talk persona commodification. I’ll introduce you to my agent.”

“All right, then.” Andre half-bowed, nodding nice-to-meet-you at Anna-Lena. “Enjoy your meal.”

“I always do.” Alam smiled, brandishing his silverware.

Macon sat down hard, glad Andre had ushered him away but ready to vent:
The nerve of that goddamned twelve-sandwich-eatingpimp. Shove your peach cobbler and your “discovery” up
your fat ass, you—

“Moves,” said Andre. “Moves!”

Irritated: “What?”

“A little grace, huh? So what, he makes five pennies off your dollar? Shake it off. He’s harmless.”

Macon winced and gave a Stevie Wonder head swoop in defiant disagreement. “See, it’s not even that,” he said, “it’s—”

“Dude!” It was Logan. He stopped to look at her.

“Your cobbler’s getting cold.”

Macon shut his mouth, and picked his fork up like a scalpel.

Chapter Six

“Ready, champ?” asked Nique, rubbing his boy’s shoulders from behind at seven-thirty A.M. in the dimly lit corridor-cum-waiting-room of WAKM-FM, the city’s premiere talk-radio station.

“Ready, Coach,” said Macon, throwing a left jab and a wicked head fake at the water cooler. It bubbled in fear. Andre and Logan, cutting school and work, sat half-asleep on the dusty leather couch, Dre’s head on Logan’s shoulder. Macon had consented to a lengthy crash course in interview skills, and until the break of day the team had tradeoff-peppered him with questions and advice to illustrate what Nique called the Basic Presidential Principles. Macon had learned the Reaganesque technique of responding to hard-nosed inquiries with tangential homespun anecdotes instead of facts, the Nixonian gambit of talking shit while simultaneously claiming high moral ground as a non-shit-talker, myriad Clintonian methods of sidestepping a repeated and reworded question, and the general tactics involved in subverting the agenda of any interviewer and saying what you damn well pleased regardless of circumstance or status.

“Knock ’em dead, Moves,” Andre mumbled, fetal posture tightening. His foot disappeared into a couch crevice. “Like Rappin’ Ron said, go out there and win one for the nigger.”

The Franchise rolled his eyes. “That’s terrible.” The cue light turned green, and Macon opened the studio door, blinking through a blast of stale air. Joe Francis beckoned him into a chair and handed him a set of headphones, then leaned over a hanging mic, pushed his nebbish glasses up his nose, and launched into his introduction.

The host had gotten his start as a reporter on the local TV news, and switched over to radio twenty years ago, when he’d begun to lose his hair. He was on the air from five to ten A.M. six days a week, and one look at his work environment slashed any illusions Macon might have harbored concerning the glamour of radio. A half-eaten cheesecake, two empty packs of Camels, several foam coffee cups, and half a dozen White Castle bags littered the table behind Francis. Even if they hadn’t, Macon would have surmised such a diet; the man had the look of an astronaut who’d been in orbit, alone, for far too long. He shaved only when his beard began to itch, showered only when he started to offend himself. On the air, he was a mild-mannered liberal, but Francis’s off-air communication—with the ponytailed engineer in the glass-walled control room across the hall, the squat producer sitting next to him, the haggard receptionist who’d showed Macon inside— consisted entirely of caustic bickering. He and his staff had clearly spent hundreds of squalid, climate-controlled hours learning how to best annoy one another.

Francis’s politics were still sharp, though, even if nothing else was. Nique had booked the appearance as a test run, a chance to tighten Macon’s game before moving to the high-stakes world of television.

“And now,” Francis was saying, “
The Joe Francis Show
is proud to bring you the first live, on-air interview with Mr. Macon Detornay, here to discuss his new organization. . . .” He consulted his clipboard and pronounced the name with a touch of disdain: “The Race Traitor Project.” Francis swiveled his worn chair a few degrees and looked at his guest for the first time. “Welcome, Macon,” he said, passing off a moment of gastrointestinal distress as a smile. “Thanks for being here today.”

“No problem.” Macon popped three left-hand knuckles in rapid succession. Francis waved at him to stop, and Macon flinched, mouthed an apology, and clasped his hands in his lap.

“Let’s begin with the events that made you famous, Macon. Without asking you to comment on the charges per se, I’d like—”

“Afraid I can’t go near that with a ten-foot pole, Joe. What I will address, though, is the sense of entitlement with which white people grow up, and which they hold on to for their entire lives. I don’t advocate violence, Joe, but white people, especially white people with money, need to consider how they got where they are. We owe a great moral debt, and we should be giving back. Before the people we exploited decide the time has come to take back.”

Francis glanced outside and wished he hadn’t. His waiting room was a ruckus of cheerleading. Andre interrupted his back-and-forth hall-sweep just long enough to bang fists with Nique at Macon’s cut-off technique; Logan stood on the couch thrusting imaginary pompoms at the sky. The Franchise watched the host watch them and smiled.

“Is that what you would consider someone who robbed white people to be doing, Macon? Taking back?”

His entourage froze and scowled, but Macon seemed unfazed. “In theory, Joe? It would depend. Who is this person? What does he or she do with the money? I hope, as we all do, that no one else will have to resort to crime. But crime has been the modus operandi of the powerful since the beginning in this country—since Europeans stole people from Africa to work land swindled from Native Americans. Those are the ground rules America set, and the disenfranchised have no option but to play along. I want to say this to white people out there who might be thinking of committing crimes, Joe: Please, make them white-on-white. Maybe if we rob each other for a while, it will give everybody else a chance to get back in the game.”

Joe Francis hunched over his mic and smacked his chops once, silently. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to take that seriously or not, Macon.” Nique, pacing too now, grinned as he crossed Andre’s path, loose-gaited and elated. He’d had a hunch this dude would be a faithful straight man.

“You know what, Joe? Neither do I. Maybe I said it just to shock people. I’m shocked every day of my life, and I want everybody else to be as well. I want to whip people up into a frenzy, until there’s nowhere for them to run and they have to confront themselves. My job is to make whiteness visible. I want white people to look at me, Joe, this crazy kid who won’t shut up about race, and realize, maybe for the first time, that hey, whiteness is an identity. See, white people don’t really see themselves as white, they see themselves as normal. You ever heard a white person describe someone as white? ‘What’s Ed look like?’ ‘Oh, he’s about six-two, white guy, mustache.’ Never. But if it’s a person of another race, they’ll mention it every time. First thing, usually. ‘John? Black guy, three feet tall, with a big prehensile tail and an extra arm growing out of his back.’

“Whiteness is off the radar, Joe. There’s no analysis of what it means to be white, historically and socially and psychologically. The only people who put forth any kind of argument at all are the total psychopaths, the super-racists. And, of course, what whiteness means to them is mostly just that you hate everybody else and, you know, keep the white race pure. Come to think of it, historically speaking maybe that definition’s not so far off. And before you even ask me, Joe, I’m gonna go ahead and answer your next question—”

Andre and Nique were standing inches from the window now, bugging out as if Macon were a racehorse in the stretch run. “Oh shit,” said Nique, punching his cohort in the arm just to do something. “ ‘Before you even ask, I’ma answer your next question.’ That’s the shit, son, that’s the shit.” Andre nodded vigorously and rubbed his arm, although it hadn’t registered that he’d been hit. Logan jumped off the couch and did a shaky row of cartwheels, down the hall and back, then leapt into Andre’s arms and struck a grand-finale pose. Joe Francis tried hard to ignore them.

“—by explaining that no, I don’t think everything is white folks’ fault. I’m talking about them because they’re my responsibility. When I talk about white people, I’m talking about myself.”

Francis saw an opening and lunged. “That’s interesting, Macon, because many people seem to consider you the blackest white person they’ve ever seen.”

Nique smiled. “He thinks that’s a curveball,” he said, wrapping an arm around the panting, dismounted Logan. “He doesn’t know this motherfucker graduated Persona Commodification 101.”

“Well, thank you, Joe. I take that as a compliment, because I consider whiteness an affliction. That’s what the Race Traitor Project is all about: encouraging people to take the first step of recognizing the privilege and the historical legacy that whiteness represents.”

“And, I would presume, becoming ‘traitors’ to whiteness.”

“It’s not an easy thing to do, Joe. White people can fall off the wagon at any time. Even John Brown, the legendary abolitionist killed in the raid at Harpers Ferry, didn’t really die for the cause. He was acting out of vengeance, trying to liberate slaves owned by his ex-wife’s lover.”

Joe Francis rubbed a thumb against his chin and cut his eyes, and for a hot second Macon panicked: He’d taken it too far and Joe was going to slay him on his bullshit answer, call Macon’s ass out. The world would realize just how little he had studied and stab him fatally through the holes in his scholarship—learn Macon was no statistical quick-draw and face him down with reams of data, machine guns full of bone-dry ammunition, take the game to a theoretic realm where he couldn’t compete on just the logic of everything he’d ever seen, the anecdotal snapshots of an unjust world. They’d cut his Achilles’ heel to ribbons and box up all the things he’d stirred in people, red-stamp INVALID, DISCREDITED across it, and drop Macon unceremoniously, screaming, off the undisrupted spinning planet, two giant Godfingers squeezing his head like an eyedropper.

But no. Joe Francis played All Media to Macon’s prevaricating Reagan. “Fascinating,” he said. “I did not know that. We’ve only got a few minutes left before we bring on our next guest, illiterate high-school basketball star and alleged cocaine dealer Chip Vanderworth, so let’s let our listeners in on the conversation, shall we? The phone lines are open. Are you there, caller?”

“Yeah, hi, Joe. Listen, I wanna know what this guy’s even doing on your show. Are we gonna provide a forum for every wackjob to tell us what’s wrong with the country?”

“You care to respond to that, Macon?”

“Not really, Joe.”

“Fair enough. Next caller?”

“Morning, Joe. Listen, Macon: I’m a fifty-seven-year-old Jewish man, and I’ve been a civil rights worker all my adult life. I was on the Freedom Ride in Mississippi, and I saw white and black people die side by side trying to change those laws. How dare you belittle the advances we made and the courage it took to make them? Where do you get off with these ludicrous generalizations? That’s the kind of thinking we fought against, son. I beg you to stop saying these outrageous things. You’re doing more harm than you know.”

Macon palmed his chin, struck dumb by the man’s reasonable tone. His first impulse was to wonder how he could attack it. He knew he had to overcome this uninformed, hip hop desire to dis every well-meaning voice, clown every hero of the past. He couldn’t allow his outrage and his need to be unique to paint the entire history of white engagement in the struggle as bullshit. He had to learn to recognize his allies, to build coalitions without feeling that it compromised him.

Joe Francis tried to catch his guest’s eye and couldn’t. “Macon?” he prompted. Dead air was the enemy. A fart was better than silence.

“First of all, sir,” Macon began, deliberately, “I have nothing but respect for you and what you’ve done. I’m not trying to belittle your accomplishments, but you changed laws, not hearts. What now? The schools are integrated, but black people get worse educations even when they’re sitting side by side with whites. The lunch counters and buses are equal: great, but so what? I hate to say it, but those victories just make it easier for white people to act like racism is a problem that got solved back in the sixties. We’re running out of things to point at, branches to cut down, and the bottom line is that white folks still are not invested.”

Macon felt himself slipping into just the kind of alienating rant he wanted to avoid. “I am speaking in generalizations,” he conceded. “Maybe what I’m saying doesn’t apply to you at all. Then again, who knows? Plenty of people believe in civil rights, or even affirmative action, and then have a heart attack when their daughter starts dating a black guy.” Macon broke off, flustered by his own hostility.

“I guess what I wonder,” he resumed, “is where people with your kind of courage—and there aren’t many—should direct it today. It’s easy to fight Bull Connor, because he’s siccing German shepherds on people. But what do we do about your next-door neighbor, who only says the n-word in his mind? And who just so happens to be a loan officer at the neighborhood bank, and president of the local P.T.A.?”

Macon glanced into the hall and saw Andre, Nique, and Logan standing quietly, their faces set. He imagined the caller—a great guy, probably, an ally—switching off his radio disgusted, and he felt the guy’s disgust, felt like a young punk.

No time to dwell on it; Joe Francis punched in the next caller. “Yo, whaddup, cuz. This is Crazy Chris from the Cheshire, Connecticut, Rollin’ Crips, and I wanna give hella love to my dog Macon. It’s about time fools recognized that us crackas be bangin’, too. We catch bodies, cuz, we put in work. It ain’t just niggas that be gangstas. That’s some racist shit. Keep bangin’, cuz. I’m out.” The line went dead.

Macon pointed a finger at the switchboard. “That guy may be an idiot,” he said, back on firm footing, “but there’s potential there. The so-called ‘wigger’—which is a term I’m not really down with, actually, since it’s generally used by white people to insult other white people by likening them to blacks—if his energy is harnessed, he can change the face of race in America. It might be for the wrong reasons, but he cares about black culture. Maybe he just feels entitled to claim it like everything else, but he does step outside himself in the pursuit. He wants to connect. We can work with that. One love, Crazy Chris, you jackass.”

Chip Vanderworth’s arrival truncated the discussion. Joe Francis ushered in the gangly All-City point guard like an old army buddy, segueing like mad. He couldn’t wait to see the last of Macon’s obnoxious ass, ratings be damned.