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Authors: Adam Mansbach

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Angry Black White Boy (21 page)

BOOK: Angry Black White Boy
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Andre shook his head slowly, blinked long. A sharp snort of fake laughter escaped him. “You’re a dick, dude. You know that?”

“I’ve been told.”

“You’ve been told. Great.” Andre rubbed his temples with his fingertips, bent at the waist, and winced as several vertebrae popped. “I’m fuckin’ exhausted,” he announced. “I’m going to bed.” He glanced down at Logan. “You staying?”

She stared at him, then tossed her magazine aside and stood. “Um, no. As inviting as that sounds. I should go home.” She slung her bag over her shoulder and strode to the door. “See you tomorrow.”

They watched her go in silence. Andre shuffled to his dresser, opened a drawer, and removed his toiletry kit.

“Hey, Dre. Listen.” Andre turned to find his roommate standing with his fist extended, offering a pound. “It’s just the stress. I’m sorry, man.”

Andre looked him up and down. “Save it for tomorrow,” he said, and walked into the bathroom.

Chapter Ten

The Day of Apology jumped off partly cloudy, with predicted highs at sixty-five, and Macon woke up to a bowl of Frosted Flakes and the worst headache of his life. He and Andre sat slurping sugar-tinted milk in silent solidarity, bleary-eyed and apprehensive, limbs weighty, every gesture taking on an air of ceremony. Neither one was yet ready to look outside. They’d been up for fifteen minutes when Nique burst in, beaded with sweat and already halfway through his daily pack of cigarettes at nine A.M.

“It’s cracker Halloween out there,” he said, going straight to the window. Chests pressed to the glass, Andre and Macon peered down and saw the stretch of pavement between Broadway and Amsterdam street-fair dense with rippling humanity. Macon’s heart fluttered with nervous excitement: Here it was. He imagined flinging open the window and addressing them from here.
My
loyal subjects . . .

“Whoa, whoa.” Nique’s voice was unnaturally high-pitched, and Macon abandoned the reverie in time to see his Minister of Information crank open the window and stick his head out.

“What the fuck is this?” Nique screamed, with so much force that the tendons in his neck strained. “What are you doing?”

A long line of blue-uniformed Columbia security guards had materialized out of nowhere, and they were marching up the middle of the block, splitting the crowd before them.

“They’re driving the cattle,” said Andre in disbelief, and sure enough the crowd was cleaving, shuffling toward the ends of the block as the guards flushed them out with gentle pressure:
Sorry,
but you’re breaking fire code, people, you can’t be here, move it
along now, folks, you can’t stay here, come on, let’s go,
ignoring the moos and lows of protest and disappointment. In less than a minute, the block was nearly empty. Only a tight central cluster of people remained, penned in by more security men.

“Why do they get to stay?” wondered Macon, squinting at the knot. “What’s so special about them?”

Nique was livid. “Columbia’s not getting away with this shit,” he vowed. “Come on, let’s get down there before they try to pull anything else.” The three of them hustled down the grime-caked stairs and surfaced on 114th Street, now cordoned off by rows of security at Broadway and Amsterdam, no coming or going. A cheer went up and the crowd of remaining white folks—fifty? seventy-five?—began chanting Macon’s name.

The cluster was mottled with kente cloth suits, dashikis and kufis, Afro wigs and scattered signs reading I’M SORRY and BLACK POWER.

“Where the fuck these people from?” asked Andre. “Andromeda?”

“Close,” said Nique. “A little place between California and New York that I like to call America.”

An adolescent kid in blackface squirmed his way through the bodies and ran up to Macon, grinning through white greasepaint lips. The Franchise gaped—
What have I done?
—wondered if he was looking into some kind of metaphysical fun-house mirror,
this
motherfucker me, this how I look, this who I am,
pictured his ethos echoing through space only to be decoded wrong, misconstrued and acted on, flags stabbing up the ground in Macon’s name,
am I
the captain on the ship of fools?
Before he could stop himself, Macon popped the kid in the nose, leaving skid marks on his paint job. The crowd gave a collective gasp. Tears sprouted from the kid’s eyes and he looked up at Macon through the wetness, hurt and confused.

“What’s the matter with you? Go clean yourself up this instant.”

“Yes, sir,” he choked, and scurried out of sight. He wasn’t more than twelve or thirteen, Macon realized: a child who’d come to the Big City all the way from West Bubblefuck, cajoled some parent into letting him take a bus or maybe snuck away, imagination stirred and heart aching, inspired and perplexed by Macon and all this justice talk. And so he fucks up, okay, he doesn’t really understand, nobody around him knows any better, nobody’s there to say,
Wipe that shit off, boy, that ain’t right to be wearing,
but the kid wants to be down and so he gets off the bus and finds the man himself, the guy they came to see, and he runs up expecting to be loved, embraced, he who made this daring journey, and instead the hero of the whole thing, the guy who lit up his TV and mind and got him on the bus, for whom he skipped school and convinced or defied Mom, the guy socks him in the nose like it’s nothing.

“Hey, come back,” Macon called, immediately sorry. “I didn’t mean to do that.” But the kid was gone.

“Speech! Speech!” clamored the crowd, forgiving him—ecstatic that they had been selected from amongst thousands to share this moment with Macon. New York City subway maps stuck out from their back pockets like tail feathers. Red circles marked the South Bronx, Harlem, Flatbush. Cameras and binoculars were slung around their necks; fanny packs rode the crests of their asses. Behind them, set up on the stoop of a frat house, a gaggle of TV cameras poised to capture Macon’s starter-pistol speech. Reporters mingled with the crowd, asking folks how far they’d traveled to be here today, complicit in the fiction that this horde was the entire crowd.

Macon folded his arms over his chest and stood stock-still, composing himself to speak. He wanted to set things off with a bang, but Columbia’s sabotage and the garish assemblage before him had sapped his motivational juices. The hush swelled up, electric, and Macon grimaced, swallowed, and opened his mouth.

“What’s with the costumes?” he asked weakly.

The crowd turned to one another, concerned:
He doesn’t like
our outfits?

“We wanted to dress black,” shouted a large, Southern-voiced woman. “Those people just have so much spirit.”

“You’re not black,” Macon informed her. The murmuring increased; Macon sensed the potential for total demoralization and quickly shifted gears, not wanting them to trudge back to the buses. Time to snatch victory from the jaws of ignorance.

“Look, just be yourselves,” he said, walking over to a tall blond man wearing a red-black-and-green liberation jumpsuit, removing his leather Africa cap and handing it to him. “The whole idea is to recognize who you are and take responsibility. It’s not time to start embracing our inner blackness yet, y’all. Right now it’s about atonement. You don’t have cultural permission to dress like this, you understand?”

Unease rippled through the crowd. “Are they gonna beat us up?” a panicked male voice shouted from the back. Nique and Andre slapped their foreheads with Olympic-quality synchronization.

“No,” said Macon. “No one’s gonna beat you up. Not that you don’t deserve it.” They smiled. Bunch of fucking masochists, thought Andre.

“Look, you’re here because you recognize the injustice inherent to the system, right?”

They stood silent.

“Right?” Macon repeated.

“Right,” they called back, catching on.

“You’re here to take a tiny first step in the marathon toward change,” Macon told them, starting to get into it. A King Jr. “I Have a Dream” freeze-frame stirred him, and Macon lifted his voice on some resonant vibrato baritone shit. “. . . to say, ‘I understand’ ”—drawing out the
I
all preacherly and hitting
stand
hard, then grace-note pausing midsentence and soaring back up— “ ‘that mah whiteness . . . is o-ppressive.’ You are here . . . to plant your feet and commit . . . to work . . . toward dialogue.”

“Where can we buy our T-shirts?”

“Will you sign my T-shirt?”

“Are there any sweatshirts?”

“Forget the fucking T-shirts!” Macon screamed. Andre stepped forward and touched him lightly on the forearm, rebalancing the charismatic leader with a tiny show of confidence. Macon turned and met his eyes, nodded gratefully, and inhaled deep. “This isn’t a party,” he said, trading righteous dignity for tired grade-school-teacher sternness. “It’s not a sight-seeing trip or a group tour. Do not run around trying to set the record for most apologies, people. Do not ask anyone to pose for pictures. Just split up, go about your daily business, and speak to the people you happen to come across.”

“What about mule-attos?” twanged a scruffy front-row yokel in a dreadlock wig. “Do they count, too, or jes’ one hunnerd percent Nigroes?”

“How do we tell the difference?”

“Don’t we get a box lunch?”

“What are we supposed to say when we see ’em?”

“If I already got my T-shirt on, am I supposed to take it off?”

Macon’s face turned red. He gritted his teeth, glanced at Nique with a look that said,
I’m about to start choking motherfuckers,
opened his mouth to respond, and found he had no words. He stood mute for a moment, the crowd blinking studiously at him like,
Yes, jolly good questions all. What shall we do about the
mule-attos and the lunches and the dialogue, old boy?
Then Macon turned on his heel, stalked up the block, and disappeared into the dorm. The herd stood stupefied, pawing the ground and wondering what had happened.

“Okay,” said Andre, stepping in to save the day. “You can practice on me.”

“We’re sorry!” boomed the crowd.

Andre nodded his head and shot a searing glance at Nique:
Go
after him, yo.
Nique stayed put.

“Thank you,” Andre told the horde. “I appreciate that.” They beamed at him and one another; this wasn’t so hard.

“What are you sorry for?” he asked, stalling. Their faces dropped.

“Are they gonna ask us that?” The fat woman in kente cloth looked worried.

Andre shrugged. “They might.” The murmurs, rimmed with terror, grew. “Don’t you know what you’re sorry for?”

“We’re sorry for them?” someone asked hopefully, sounding like a third-grader jerked out of a daydream by a teacher’s question.

Andre stared at them. “Anyone else?”

Nique had heard enough. He strode to the front of the crowd and paced back and forth, swinging his arms. “Imagine you’re walking home late at night and you see me coming down a dark alley right toward you,” he shouted like a drill sergeant. “What’s the first thought that crosses your scared honky minds? Apologize for that.” A few people nodded slowly—
Oh, I get it
—and sprouted little smiles. Nique scowled and kept pacing. The knot of people tightened. “Imagine I work at your job and I get the promotion you’re after,” he bellowed. “What’s the first thing you think? Apologize for that. Imagine I ring your doorbell to take your daughter to the fucking junior prom. You get the picture?”

“Yeah!” they screamed, confused, agreeable, invigorated.

“You’re a bunch of racist-ass hillbillies. Right?”

“Right!”

“Black people have been putting up with your paternalistic bullshit for too long. Right?”

“Right!”

“Are you sorry?”

“Yes!”

“Say it!”

“We’re sorry!”

“The fuck you are. You crackers don’t get it and you never will. Even for white people you’re pathetic. Say it!” He threw his fist in the air.

“We don’t get it and we never will! Even for white people we’re pathetic!” Seventy-five fists punctured the sky.

“Now get out there and make your little insignificant bullshit gesture you don’t even understand, and maybe you’ll learn something! Go!”

The crowd dispersed, afraid to stay: a shattering kaleidoscope of African prints and glinting electronics. They pulled out maps and meandered up and down Broadway in groups of three and four, averting their eyes as they passed Nique. A middle-aged woman, tall and conservatively dressed, was the only person to approach him.

“That was brilliant,” she gushed. “I’m a communications professor at a small college in Iowa, and I thought that was just wonderful. You really got those people thinking.” She paused and swallowed, smiled shyly. “I might as well start here.” She straightened her long skirt, then raised her head and looked Nique squarely in the eye. “I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that I truly am sorry. Racism is something we grow up with—Lord knows I did—but I’m doing my best not to pass it on to my children.” When Nique said nothing, she kept talking. “I’m deeply thankful for this opportunity to express my sorrow and recommit myself to trying,” she finished.

Andre gave her a smile. She returned it gratefully.

Nique darted his eyes away, then back to hers. “If you’re so sorry, gimme your watch.”

The woman blinked. “I-I’m sorry. What?”

“You’re so sorry, gimme your watch.”

“Give you my watch?” she repeated. Her face creased, and she wrapped her right hand around her left wrist.

Nique sucked his teeth. “Thought so,” he said, and walked away. “Come on, Andre,” he called over his shoulder, “let’s go find the fucking Franchise.”

Andre backed away from the woman, who remained rooted to her spot, perplexed. “Thank you,” he soothed her. “Really. Never mind my friend. His father was a Panther.” He sprinted after Nique, and the two of them walked swiftly and wordlessly through the Carman lobby and stood stoic, sweating, in the elevator, imagining the thousands of outtatown white folks roaming the five boroughs like escaped zoo animals this very second.

They found Macon naked from the waist up, leaning his palms against the bathroom wall as if waiting to be frisked. He tapped his head against the tiling every two seconds, like a blind man’s stick against the pavement: hard enough to hurt, but not much.

“What”—bang—“the”—bang—“fuck,” said Macon, before they could scream at him. He looked up. “What the fuck?”

“What the fuck you expect?” countered Nique. “A bunch of erudite, die-for-the-cause radicals? Of course not. A few sincere cats and boatloads of retards is what we were bound to get, specially selected or not.”

“Which is okay,” said Andre quickly. “Maybe having black people tell them to go fuck themselves will be a good experience.”

“Or, more likely, they’ll get back on the buses like, ‘Fuck those niggers,’ ” said Nique. “Which at least is honest.”

“Malcolm never said what black people’s response should be when white folks started apologizing,” Macon said in a small voice.

BOOK: Angry Black White Boy
7.27Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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