Angry Black White Boy (2 page)

BOOK I

TRADER

I was the only player to take advantage of the grandfather clause
written into the International League’s new rule. All the other
colored players slung their bats over their shoulders and walked on
April 29, 1889, the day the commissioner announced that the
motion to segregate the league had passed. Negroes under contract
could serve out the remainder of the season with their teams, but
the boys knew what those final months would be like, especially in
the Southern cities. The grandfather clause was sarcasm, a final
insult. They walked out of pride.

Out of pride, I stayed with the New York Giants. I was thirty-three
years old and nobody was going to run me out of my chosen
profession one second earlier than law allowed.

The man most responsible for the new rule, or at least the
man claiming the most credit, was Adrian Constantine “Cap”
Anson, Chicago’s first baseman and manager, the greatest hitter
the game had ever known. Anson had been pushing segregated
play for years, some said since the day his club had lost the season
to the Senators and Washington’s great colored pitcher, Left Hand
Baker, had fanned him in five straight at-bats.

Anson had done more for the game’s popularity than any man,
and when he talked people listened, even the owners. Cap Anson
sandlot teams dotted the country. On billboards along every league
ballpark’s outfield walls, Cap Anson endorsed tooth powders and
health tonics. When Anson came to town the gate receipts went
up, the bleachers filled. And when he asked why niggers were
allowed to play with white men and dirty up the Great American
Pastime with their cheating and their coon balls, people wondered
themselves.

Niggers, Anson told the owners, didn’t understand a lick of
strategy. They brought nigger fans into the ballparks, encouraged
them to enter white neighborhoods and socialize with white folks.
The excitement of the game was too much for nigger fans to
handle; they got riled up and then they went out causing trouble. Athletically, niggers’ big thighs and clumsiness prevented them from
being good fielders. And did the league really want to risk what
might happen if a nigger player lost his temper, as the race was
notorious for doing, and in a fit of rage turned on a white opponent
with a bat? Integrated play was a disaster waiting to happen,
Anson told the owners, and the owners put it to a vote and found
that they agreed. Baseball was a game of dignity and poise, a white
man’s game.

And thus on April 29, 1889, I was not just the only colored in a
uniform, but the only colored in the entirety of Atlanta, Georgia’s
Robert E. Lee Stadium for the exhibition matinee between the
New York Giants and Cap Anson’s Chicago White Stockings.
There was still a small fenced-off section of decaying bleachers
marked
For Coloreds Only,
but it stayed empty as the stadium
filled up. Colored fans, like colored players, had walked away
from the game. I wondered what they thought of me for staying. I
wasn’t out to be a hero, but until I looked up and saw the colored
section empty, a barren, blighted patch amidst the fertile farmland,
it hadn’t occurred to me that folks might have thought I was
selling out by staying where I wasn’t wanted.

The game began at two, so at one-thirty I took to the outfield
with Red Donner, our first baseman, to warm up my arm. Red and
I stood thirty feet apart and had a catch, Red tossing me slow
grounders and me throwing back to Red on a line while he stood
with his foot edging the imaginary first-base bag. I bent at the
knees before the first roller, sprang to my toes, pivoted, threw, and
watched the ball sail over Red’s left shoulder, six inches from his
outstretched glove.

“Say, Red, what’s the matter? You lose it in the sun?”

Red gaped past me. “Behind you.”

I turned. Filing into the box seats behind third base was a procession of some fifty costumed Klansmen, the white of their hoods
shockingly bright in the sunlight. They moved loosely, just another
day at the ballpark, glanced at their ticket stubs and found their
seats and hunched with elbows on their knees and chatted.

They’re going to kill me, was my first thought. I turned away,
not wanting them to know I’d seen them, looked around the park
and watched as fans poured in. I scanned the crowd for signs of
shock, for some acknowledgment that there was a costumed militiapresent, but folks seemed no different than ever. How many of
the uncostumed were any less willing to watch me die? Who would
lift a finger, raise a voice in protest if the Klan rushed the field and
a swarm of white fabric billowed up around me like a curtain in
the breeze, folding me into itself until I disappeared?

I sprinted to the dugout looking straight ahead. A cheer like
rifle fire rose up from behind the third-base line as I passed the delegation, passed where I would stand with my back to the enemy for
nine innings, twenty-seven outs, engaged in what seemed suddenly
like both an impossibly foolish, infantile game and an undertaking
as serious as anything in life could ever be.

“I talked to one of them,” said Buck Desota, our manager,
when I hustled down the steps and into the cool refuge of the dugout’s shadows. He put his arm around my shoulders and walked
me toward the bat rack at the far end of the pen. “He said they’re
not here to cause any trouble.” Buck paused, tugged at one of the
round earlobes that stuck out from his big square head like handles, and looked me in the eye. “Just to celebrate the purification
of baseball.” He placed one foot on the dugout’s bottom step,
leaned on his knee, and squinted over the corrugated metal roof,
down at the third-base stands. “Maybe you ought to take the day
off, Fleet. I can play Eubanks today.”

My eyes flickered, darted left, then set on Buck. “I’m your third
baseman,” I said. “You play me.”

I was the third man in the batting order, and when I stepped
onto the field, it seemed that every voice in the ballpark came to
life. I knocked the dirt from my spikes and marched to the batter’s
box. The shouting was so loud I couldn’t distinguish any words,
but I knew they were saying nigger, coon, get out, go home. Nothing I hadn’t heard before.

I called time, stepped out of the box, and rubbed my eyes with
a thumb and forefinger, trying to sift through the sounds and
isolate a single insult, pick out a single voice, to remind me that these
were only men. Without meaning to, I turned and looked at the
Klan delegation behind third. They responded to my glance with a
frenzy of fist-shaking and noise, elated to be acknowledged. It was
all too much. I dug in and cocked back my bat, dying to swing
clean through the sea of hate.

It should have occurred to me and didn’t until it was almost too
late: The White Stockings were going to throw at my head. I hit
the dirt as the pitch whistled past my ear and the crowd roared,
keened toward me jeering, wanting blood. I stood up and dusted
off, and the pitcher reared back and threw a second fastball, a
body blow this time. It stung my thigh and the ump waved me toward my base. I clenched my jaw, determined not to betray any
trace of pain. Held the bat a second too long before sloughing it
off toward the dugout, reluctant to forfeit my only weapon, and
jogged down to first, where Cap Anson was waiting.

He grinned at me around a plug of tobacco, hands on his hips.
“You best to quit while you still can, boy.” Anson spit a stream of
juice onto my left cleat and grinned up at the fans to see if they had
noticed. “You tell Buck I said to take you out ’fore things get
ugly.”

I didn’t respond. Took a big lead, as much to get away from
Anson as to get a jump on the pitch, and when it came I tore off
down the base path and slid into second in a gust of dust, spikes
slashing holes in the air. The throw from the catcher was too high,
and by the time the baseman put the tag on me, my leg was wrapped
around the bag. It wasn’t even close.

“He’s out!” the umpire screamed, jerking his thumb toward
heaven, and the stadium combusted. I got to my feet, read the
treachery in his beady eyes, and trotted toward the dugout. Not
too fast, not too slow.

I grabbed my glove from the bench and turned to find Buck
Desota close enough to smell: tobacco, rawhide, aftershave. “I
know this is hard,” Buck said, “but keep your head in the game,
Walker. I didn’t flash you no steal sign.”

I slipped my hand into the cool leather glove and pounded my
fist into the palm. “Sometimes a man just has to run,” I said.

Chapter One

Macon Everett Detornay fisted the wheel and swung his new yellow cab downtown. Hip hop didn’t raise no moon-eyed lover-boys, and Macon would be dead before the thought of whittling down passion from a blunt lump to a harpoon, something you could aim at a person, would take shape inside him. All the things he loved were too big, comical to throw your arms around like carnival prize teddy bears: truth, revolution, huge nonexistent shit like that.

It was a little past rush hour now, and Macon flipped on his radio and relaxed as the venerable voice of Kool DJ Red Alert introduced an old-school set on Hot 97 FM, the station whose tagline, “Where hip hop lives,” had inspired more than one underground MC to declare himself dead. As the omnipotent what’shot-what’s-not market arbiter of the late nineties, Hot 97 had played matchmaker for hip hop and psychotic materialism, advising hip hop to stop returning phone calls from former lovers like Black Power and Social Responsibility, encouraging the couple to move in together, and finally, in an exclusive Aspen ceremony attended by three hundred CEOs and only a handful of artists and project-housing thugs, to exchange diamond-flooded Rolexes and sign the merger deal in blood. When the honeymoon waned, the station placated hip hop’s ornery elders, pissed and financially slighted, by paying periodic tribute to “the pioneers of the old school” with five-second announcements encouraging their audience of fourteen-year-old wannabe gangster macks to “know their history.”

None of which had jack to do with Red; his drive-time show remained untainted by payola, his very employment a paean to purer days. The crossfader glided clean across the mixer and into a classic, dancing New York City’s newest cabdriver straight down memory lane. “I useta roll up / this is a hold up, ain’t nothin’ funny / stop smilin’, be still / don’t nothin’ move but the money,” Rakim Allah intoned, smooth with the roughness, reflecting on the tax-free paper he had clocked before he “learned to earn / cause I’m Righteous”: before he joined the Five Percent Nation and gained Knowledge of Self and realized that the Original Asiatic Black Man was the Maker, the Owner, the Cream of the Planet Earth, Father of Civilization and God of the Universe. Before he became part of the Five Percent of the population who overstood the Supreme Mathematics and threw off the shackles of mental slavery to become Poor Righteous Teachers.

Macon knew the Five Percenters’ rules as well as any whiteboy could, first from listening to the lyrics of the Righteous and then from living at Lajuan’s crib in Jamaica Plain for the last fifteen months, where black men who called themselves Gods sat around all day with eyelids quartermasted from smoking blunts and drinking ninety-nine-cent twenty-two-ounce Ballantines, talking about women who were not called Earths, as doctrine dictated, but bitches. The apartment was a degenerate sitcom: jokes and laugh tracks, heated interlocking minutes of family therapy, “Son, son, listen” interruptions, sex convo and chess games and rhymes and rhymes and beats to the rhymes and the every-occasion, rain-sleet-or-pestilence query “Who’s going to the weedspot?”; long-ass conversations that flipped general to specific and then back again in an endless, fascinating, and pointless battle of verbs and philosophy, volume and religion, rhetoric and flowskills.

Macon had learned the most from Jihad, the big-entrance-making uninvited drop-in neighbor the audience loved: a Newportsmoking, monologue-spitting herbologist with matching Nikes for every rugby shirt he owned and a penchant for talking the esoteric God Body Science of the Five Percenters from one mouth corner and hustle-ego-watch-me as unfiltered as New York tap water out the other. Macon’s star-vehicle spin-off, cats joked, would be a show called
Adopted Brother.
They plotted episodes in the perennial back-alley twilight that slashed in sideways from the street lamp and gave the dust something to dance in besides the glow of the forever-on TV.

Chinese takeout boxes filled the garbage can, and a ten-pound bag of white rice lived a bachelor’s life in the one uncorroded cabinet. Cats would go to the store for hot sauce, barbecue sauce, ranch dressing, go to McDonald’s and jack three hundred little ketchup packets, whatever you could pour on rice for flavor. Only on Sunday afternoons did they sit down and really eat, and then only because when Macon moved in he’d instituted-slash-sponsored the ritual of family dinners. They’d make turkey lasagna, Jihad and Aura grating cheese into silver mixing bowls and making Sal’s Pizzeria jokes from
Do the Right Thing
and Macon sitting in Lajuan’s room, where he hid to do his writing, scribbling in a notebook and listening at the same time, overhearing and folding what was overheard into his thoughts like mushrooms into an omelet.

Everything was always too much in that crib; the drinks too strong, the weed too harsh, the conversation too aggressive, the chess battles waged on the bootleg coffee table too long and reckless, the music too loud. Dudes cut each other off, spoke fast and until interrupted, acted like the dilettante scientific and social analogies they constructed were the perfect tools of proof—which somehow they often were, like “Naah, son . . . SON! Do the knowledge: Boom, it’s like magnetic attraction. The gravitation doesn’t work unless the shit is mutual, so ‘love is blind’ is Now Cipher, God. It’s like how some cats say that niggas can’t be racist, you know, you know the science on that, you can’t be racist unless you have the power to be racist, so boom, you can’t say you in love unless you both in love; one person in love is like the sound of one hand clapping, God.”

Macon switched lanes without signaling, loving the order and chaos of Manhattan driving, and made an arbitrary right turn. He’d learned his way around already, before he’d even posed for his driver’s ID; it had taken him all of a week. New York was simple, a grid: choices galore, traffic laws optional. Boston, by contrast, was a lunatic maze of dead ends and one-ways, a city whose streets had evolved from cowpaths to highways with no sign of topological supervision. Macon had spent all twenty years of his life there, and even on his final day of work at the charter-car service, he’d gotten lost carting a vanful of Japanese businessmen to a suburban conference. Now exhilaration filled him and he tightened his left-handed grip on the wheel: Fuck racist-ass, provincial Boston. New York City, baby. Here at last. The center of the universe. He turned the music up, digging the unity of place and soundscape, relishing not just his understanding of each line of Rakim’s verse, but the fact that he could scarcely remember a time when he hadn’t known this shit.

With idle pride, Macon scrolled through some of what he knew. The Ten Percent were the bloodsuckers of the poor. They had Knowledge of Self but were not Righteous, and they preyed on the ignorance of the Eighty-Five who were Deaf, Dumb, and Blind to the truth. The Divine Alphabet allowed Gods and Earths to communicate in code; when Sadat X from Brand Nubian rhymed “the born cipher cipher master / makes me think much faster,” he meant the b-o-o-m, the boom, the weed. One hundred and twenty sacred Lessons awaited mastery; Jihad had sometimes disappeared behind a plywood bedroom door to study, or claim he was studying and smoke a blunt for dolo. Elijah Muhammad’s old Caucasian creation myth—the evil scientist Dr. Yacub grafts a barbaric white race from the Original Asiatic Black, a warlike people banished to the caves of cold, dark Europe but destined to rule the earth for sixty centuries—was tacitly endorsed, and white folks were called devils.

But were all white people devils? Could there be exceptions? What about that dude Paul C., who’d engineered Eric B. & Rakim’s album? What about Macon, who built with the Gods morning, noon, and night, passed out alongside them on perpendicular couches with his sneakers touching theirs, high off shared wack buddha? Macon had lost sleep looking for a loophole back in 1990, when the smoovest MC on the planet was Grand Puba Maxwell, asking “Can a Devil fool a Muslim? No, not nowadays bro,” and declaring, “It’s time to drop the bomb and make the Devil pay the piper.”

From Macon’s confusion had bubbled anger. How dare black people not see him as an ally, not recognize that he was down? He retaliated by studying their history, their culture: He was a thirteen-year-old whiteboy in a Malcolm X T-shirt, alone at the first annual Boston Hip Hop Conference, heart fluttering with intimidation and delight as scowling bald-headed old schoolers pointed at his chest, demanding, “Whatchu know about that man?” Which was exactly what he’d wanted, why he’d worn it. He ran down Malcolm’s life for them, watched them revise their expressions with inward elation, nodded studiously at their government assassination theories, rhymed when the chance presented itself. Tagged other graffiti writers’ blackbooks and wondered what it would take to be scratched from the devil list for good.

And yet history was overwhelming, and down deep Macon knew the truth. Who but white folks, his folks, had been so brutal for so long? He’d retreated briefly into his own Judaism,
Jewish-not-white,
with its analogous history of victimization and enslavement, but he couldn’t make it fit, couldn’t make himself feel Jewish, didn’t know what being Jewish felt like. He tossed the Star of David medallion Grandma had given him back into the dresser after a day, reflecting that race pride was a fashion trend he’d been completely iced out of. The sterling necklace’s drawer mate was the red-green-and-gold
Increase the Peace
medallion Macon had bought after Three Times Dope released their single of the same name; he’d copped it from a Downtown Crossing vendor as a less fly but more plausible alternative to the Africa medallions everybody was rocking post–Jungle Brothers. Macon never even wore it in his room.

Instead he lay on his bed in his parents’ house, music streaming past him low enough to go unheard in the kitchen below, and went to work constructing a rhetorical framework that would allow him to embrace the Five Percenters’ truths without capitulating his soul:
White people aren’t evil, but evil is white people.
There it was. Simple. Elegant. True. It bought Macon space to live in, to be special, angry, the exception, the crusader. The down whiteboy.
You my nigga, Macon. You a’ight.

The light clicked green and Red switched up the soundtrack, segueing into “Days of Outrage, Operation Snatchback,” X-Clan’s song about being assaulted by cops at the Yusef Hawkins rally on the Brooklyn Bridge. Macon rolled his window down and dipped his elbow into the warm fall air, smiling. He remembered how when X-Clan’s album dropped in 1990—damn, had it been eight years already?—brothers in Boston had started wearing quasi-military African pimpgear just like them: nose rings, leather ankh caps, red-black-and-green bead necklaces, knee-high boots, carved wooden staffs. Macon had just scraped together the money to buy his first set of turntables that year, some bullshit Geminis, in the hopes of becoming a DJ—hopes soon aborted by impatience, mediocre rhythm, and the fact that he was surrounded by cats who actually caught rek on the decks, who brushed him aside and onto the mic so they could do so.

Brothers would congregate at his crib after school to freestyle and make mix tapes, trooping through the kitchen en route to the basement wearing some outlandish shit and baffling the hell out of his mother. Everyone was perfectly polite—“Hello, Mrs. Detornay”—and his mother said, “Hi, guys,” and smiled back, but if she had suspected before that she didn’t understand her son, a legion of staff-wielding pro-black rappers marching through her kitchen and interrupting her
People
magazine perusal certainly confirmed that shit.

A hand shot up on the west side of Wall Street, and Macon swerved to the man’s side. The stiff-armed gesture people used to summon taxis was only a few degrees north of the Nazi salute, Macon reflected as he hit the unlock button, and especially reminiscent when performed by somber-suited young businessmen. The vapors of entitlement that steamed from these yuppies irked him; they were so fucking sure the cab would stop for them. They’d never been snubbed in their lives, sized up and passed by because the driver thought they wouldn’t pay or that they wanted to be taken somewhere ghetto. Back home, Macon had flagged cabs while Lajuan and Aura stood discreetly down the block, pretending not to be with him, approaching only when Macon had the door open. It was another way, he thought with pride, that they had cheated racism.

Two guys in their early thirties clambered into Macon’s backseat. “Eighty-fifth and Fifth,” commanded the one on the left, a wispy blond who didn’t look up from the gold-rimmed glasses he was wiping with his necktie.

“We’re already fucking late,” the other one informed him. “The reservation was for six.” Mr. Punctuality’s dark hair was thinning on top; razor-burn flared from his neck as he pulled off his tie with a meaty left fist and undid his top button. On the night of Macon’s high-school prom, when he had dropped by in his father’s Camry to pick up Aura and his date, Aura’s mother had told Macon to remember three things as she redid his necktie for him: Nothing is sexier than a man who wants to be wearing his suit, nothing is unsexier than a man imprisoned by his suit, and a woman can always tell the difference. These jokers, Macon thought, were prisoners for sure.

The one on the left, Mr. Eighty-fifth and Fifth, had the same rock-solid Roman nose as a guy Macon had known in high school, a senior when Macon was a freshman. Scott Cartwright was probably president of his fraternity; he’d been lacrosse captain back then. Out of the blue one day, he had stopped Macon in the hall outside the cafeteria and poked a thick finger into Macon’s bird-chest.

“You think you’re pretty fuckin’ cool, huh, dude? Sitting at the black table, kickin’ it like you’re Vanilla Ice or something?”

Cartwright turned his dirty white baseball cap backward and bent into Macon’s face. “People laugh at you, dude. I don’t even know you, and I sit there and laugh my fuckin’ ass off.” Macon had stood for a moment staring back, tightroping the thread between provocation and cowardice, then asked, “Are we finished?” He’d been going for a kind of
Sir, request dismissal
tone, but Macon couldn’t disguise his boredom and the words sounded insolent instead. Scott slammed him up against a locker, mad corny, like they were characters in a John Hughes movie, and Macon wanted to want to laugh, but instead his ears burned and he wanted to kill Scott Cartwright, hated himself because at that moment he cared what Scott Cartwright thought of him—felt ridiculous, ashamed. And yet Macon knew he’d courted this. He wanted his defection from whiteness and his acceptance by black people to be public, the subject of wonder and envy, anger and scorn.