Losing My Cool

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

  Not that it was always an easy route to go. It was not enough simply to know and to accept that you were black—you had to look and act that way, too.You were going to be judged by how convincingly you could pull off the pose. One day when I was around nine years old, my mother drove Clarence and me over to Unisex Hair Creationz, a black barbershop in a working-class section of Plainfield. Back then we had a metallic blue, used Mercedes-Benz sedan, which from the outside seemed in good condition, though underneath the hood it was anything but, as the countless repair bills Pappy juggled would attest. While the three of us waited for the light to change colors, I became transfixed by the jittery figure of a long, thin black woman in a stained T-shirt and sweatpants, a greasy scarf wrapped around her head. She was holding an inconsolable baby in one hand and puffing on a long cigarette with the other, stalking the second-floor balcony of a beat-up old Victorian mansion that had been converted into apartments.

  I must have really been staring at her, because all of a sudden I noticed that she wasn’t aimlessly pacing back and forth anymore but pointing and yelling specifically at our car. “What the fuck are you staring at?” she howled.“You rich, white motherfuckers in your Murr-say-deez, go the fuck home! You think you can just come and watch us like you in a goddamn zoo?”

  She was making a scene. Passersby in the street were taking notice and looking at our car, too. That was a time when Benzes were the shit and you had to be careful where you parked because tough guys would pull off the little hood ornament and wear it from a chain around their necks—ready-made jewelry. I was terribly uncomfortable being the center of attention there in that backseat, mentally pleading for the light to turn green. I was also confused as hell. Who were these white people this woman kept referring to? Was she talking about . . . us—was she talking about me? Of course my mother was white, but I didn’t understand how she could think I was white, too. After all, I was on the way that very moment to have my hair cut at the only barbershop in the area that would cut hair like mine—curly, nappy hair. The kind that “didn’t move,” the kind of hair that disqualified me from getting cuts at the white barbershop two blocks from my house. But this woman was talking to me.

  “Just ignore her,” my mother said, and finally we drove away. But I couldn’t drive that woman’s angry face out of my head. She had somehow stripped me of myself, taken something from me. I felt I had to protect myself from ever feeling that kind of loss again.

  When I stepped into the barbershop that day and every second Saturday afterward, I was extra careful to pay attention to the other black boys sitting inside, some with their uncles, some with their fathers and brothers, some sitting all alone. These boys became like models to me. I studied their postures and their screwfaces, the unlaced purple and turquoise Filas on their feet, their mannerisms, the way they slapped hands in the street. These boys would never be singled out and dissed the way I had been. I decided I wanted whatever it was that protected them.

  Inside Unisex, it smelled deliciously of witch hazel and Barbasol, and there were three long rows of cushioned seats facing five swiveling barber’s chairs like bleachers in a gymnasium. There was an old, fake-wood-paneled color television suspended from the ceiling in the far back corner. If a bootlegged movie wasn’t playing on the VCR, the TV stayed stuck on one channel in particular the rest of the time, a channel I soon learned was called Black Entertainment Television. At the time in the morning when I usually came into the shop, the program Rap City would be showing. These barbershop Rap City sessions were not my first exposure to hip-hop music and culture, of course; I had been aware of it vaguely through the tapes my brother brought home and played in his bedroom. I don’t believe, though, that I had ever noticed BET before, and in the strange, homogeneously black setting of Unisex Hair Creationz and the city of Plainfield beyond it, the sight of this all-black cable station mesmerized and awed me.Watching BET felt cheap and even a little wrong on an intuitive level—my parents wouldn’t admire most of what was shown; Pappy called it minstrelsy—but the men and women in the videos didn’t just contend for my attention, they demanded it, and I obliged them. They were all so luridly sexual, so gaudily decked out, so physically confident with an oh-I-wish-a-nigga-would air of defiance, so defensively assertive, I couldn’t pry my eyes away.

  One morning, Ice-T’s “New Jack Hustler” video came on, and though I didn’t know the meaning behind the title—or even whether I liked what I was hearing—I knew for sure that the other boys in the shop didn’t seem to question any of it, and I sensed that I shouldn’t, either. All of them knew the words to the song and some rapped along to it convincingly. I paid attention to the slang they were using and decided I had better learn it myself.Terms like “nigga” and “bitch” were embedded in my thought process, and I was consciously aware for the first time that it wasn’t enough just to know the lexicon. There was also a certain way of moving and gesticulating that went with whatever was being said, a silent body language that everybody seemed to speak and understand, whether rapping or chatting, which I would need to get down, too. Over the weeks and months that followed, as I became more and more adept at mimicking and projecting blackness the BET way, and while it was all still fresh to me, what struck me most about this new behavior was how far it veered not just from that of my white classmates and friends at Holy Trinity, but also from that of my father and the two older black barbers in the barbershop—sharp men who looked out of place in Unisex and who held the door and brushed parts on the sides of their heads.

  One afternoon I came home from the barbershop sporting an aerodynamic new hair creation of my own.“What on earth did you let them do to you, son?” Pappy said as soon as he saw me. (Our house was not spacious; the front door opened directly into Pappy’s study, which he had converted from what ordinarily would have been a living room. To enter the house was literally to step into his scrutinizing gaze.)

  “Huh?” I said, touching my hand to my head. The top was so flat and cylindrical it resembled an unused No. 2 pencil eraser; the sides and the back were shaved all the way down, revealing a shaft of high-yellow scalp.

  “What, they didn’t listen when you told them what you wanted?”

  “No, they did,” I said. “This is what I wanted.”

  “You wanted that?”

  “Well, yeah, it’s what everyone is wearing, Babe; it’s what’s on BET and in all the magazines.” ( We call my father Babe when speaking to him casually, kind of a tu to the vous of Pappy.)

  “And you want to look like everyone else, son? Is that what you want?” He was staring at me intently now.

  I stood there before him, studying the Air Flights on my feet. I didn’t have a response he would find remotely respectable. The thing is that I did want to look like everyone else—everyone else in the barbershop and on that TV screen. After all, even in the backseat of a big ol’ Murrsaydeez, the woman on the balcony would never mistake a brother with a flattop like this for being white.

  Annoyed or dismayed by my new coif as he was, though, Pappy allowed Clarence and me a generous amount of latitude when it came to our personal style, as long as we were giving him our best efforts in what he cared about most: the development of our minds. What this meant, giving him our best, was not that we were pressured to place first in our classes or even to get straight A’s on our schoolwork, although it would have been welcome if we did. We were expected to maintain decent grades, but it was deeper than that. Pappy, no longer working as a sociologist, now put his PhD and extensive store of personal knowledge and reading to use running a private academic and SAT preparation service from our home. From the second grade on, giving Pappy our best meant we needed to try hard in school, but much more important than that, we needed to study one-on-one with him in the evenings and on the weekends, on long vacations, and all throughout the summer break. If we could not do that, he was able to make our home the most uncomfortable inn to lodge in. When Clarence began blowing off work, he didn’t just get grounde
d, he came home to find his bedroom walls stripped bare, his Michael Jordan and Run-D.M.C. posters replaced with pastel sheets of algebra equations Pappy had printed out and tacked up.

  As for me, the first time Pappy called me into his study to explain my summer schedule, I was seven and my eyes betrayed me, welling with tears against my will. When he looked up from his notes and saw this, he got so offended that he stormed out of the room and I fell into my mother’s lap crying. I did not want to do the work he had planned for me. I wanted to play with my friends and have sleepover parties. I wanted to capture fireflies in ventilated Smucker’s jars and beat Super Mario Brothers on Clarence’s Nintendo. That was the truth. However, more than anything, I wanted not to disappoint my father. With my mother’s encouragement and some Kleenex, I followed Pappy into his bedroom and told him that I had just had something in my eye and that, in fact, I had not been crying. I was eager to start studying, I told him. He suspended his disbelief and led me back to his desk, where he proceeded to lay out an intensive program of regimented work in syllogistic and spatial reasoning, vocabulary-building, Miller analogies, arithmetic, and reading comprehension—his signature cocktail.

  If Pappy was a tyrant, he was a gentle and conflicted one, who did not relish the role. He yearned for a time when he would cease having to be one at all. What he hoped was that if he could somehow just make reading and studying appealing enough to his boys, eventually we wouldn’t need his prodding anymore and we’d simply do it on our own. To that end, he made sure not just to dangle punishment over our heads, Sword of Damocles-style, and leave it at that. He went out of his way to be fair. If we just did what he asked without too much complaint, he would do us some real solids in return, such as paying us generously for our time (“Studying is your job, and an honest day’s work deserves an honest day’s pay”), intervening on our behalf when our mother doled out chores (“Studying is their only job”), and tolerating a slew of hair, clothing, and dating choices that were in flagrant violation of his personal tastes.

  Despite these enticements, Clarence would always find it difficult to take to long periods of study, and he went through fits of resistance routinely. Being the younger brother, I had the advantage of learning from his mistakes and avoiding most of his battles. I was what Pappy called a “dutiful son.” Most of the time this dutiful-ness of mine sufficed. We were rarely in open conflict with each other, and he was almost always patient and playfully encouraging with me.

  “Thomas Chatterton,” he’d say, addressing me by my middle name as I sped through his study on my way to the kitchen, oblivious to my surroundings. “Do you know you wear the name of a brilliant poet, son?” he’d call from the other room.

  “Yeah, of course, Babe,” I’d say, poking my head into the refrigerator, looking for something sweet.

  “And do you know they call him the Marvelous Boy, his poetry was so fine?” he’d say, still talking to me from the other room.

  “Uh-uh,” I’d say with my mouth full.

  “Well, they do. His poetry was so fine, in fact, and he was so young when he wrote it, that the adults couldn’t even believe the work was his own. They all accused him of copying someone else, someone much older.”

  “They did?”

  “They sure did. And do you know that he became so distraught by this, he became so discouraged, that he killed himself when he was only seventeen years old? He decided he couldn’t live with the dishonor.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Yes it is, son. Life is not fair. But now you’re going to bring honor to his name, aren’t you? It’s very important that you do that, son.”

  “But I don’t know how to, Babe,” I’d say, returning to the study with a bowl of ice cream or a glass of soda in my hand.

  “Well, you don’t have to be a poet, son. You can be a great philosopher, for example—pull up a seat.”

  “A philosopher?” I’d say, and sit down.

  “Yes, in fact, you’re a philosopher already, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t think so,” I’d say, my cheeks flushing.

  “Well, yes you are, son. Think about it: Do you question the things around you? Do you reflect on their meaning? Are you interested in the truth?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you’re a philosopher, son,” he would tell me, and I would laugh, embarrassed because I didn’t feel at all like a philosopher, whatever that was I could only imagine. I felt ignorant, which is what I confessed to him. And he would tell me that ignorance is the beginning of knowledge and talk of men named Socrates and Confucius. He revered these two men perhaps above all other men, Socrates for his edict to know thyself and Confucius for his devotion to learning and personal excellence, he said. I would sit there at Pappy’s desk, exhausting whatever sugary collation I had brought with me from the kitchen, and listen to him talk.“Well, I’ve told you enough,” he’d eventually say. “Now, you tell me—how am I going to grow up and be smart like you?” We’d laugh and I’d try to come up with some reply. These questioning talks I had with Pappy were so frequent in my childhood that to this day the name Socrates remains mingled in my mind with the image of my balding and bearded father seated in his study. I cannot think of one without inadvertently conjuring the other.

  Sometimes, though, Pappy grew impatient waiting for the love of learning to take root in me.“I don’t understand,” he’d say in moments of frustration, “how you can keep walking past all these books and never stop to pick up a single one of them. My people told me not to read—don’t you know what I would have done to have all this? Don’t you ever get curious, son?” These were simple, honest questions that sometimes he put to me with a shake of the head and wry smile. Sometimes, though, he didn’t smile at all. In these latter moments, the look on his face was nothing like anger and something like pain—a sort of deep, serious pain I have only seen replicated in pictures of black faces of a certain age and demographic. It was a pain that I knew I couldn’t have caused but somehow must have mistakenly activated. I would stand there looking at him, frozen, like a deer suspended in halogen beams, and stammer some weak response.

  That particular afternoon after my visit to the barbershop, Pappy let drop the subject of my rectangular head of hair and handed me my work for the day. There was no long talk and no sadness in his face that afternoon. “Memory exercises and then vocabulary, both synonyms and antonyms,” he said.“Write them all out on flashcards and then come see me.”

  “OK, Babe,” I said, and went to my room carrying a pale green tachistoscope, a stack of SAT and GRE word lists, and a thick Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, glad to have dodged a confrontation. After a morning spent at the barbershop, submerged in Black Entertainment Television, speaking and thinking in my florid second tongue—Ebonics—it was time now to return to the staid and familiar language of my father.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Wicked Genie

  The ball arced high off the rim, up above the top of the back-board, and over in the direction of the stage, where, on special occasions, we put on concerts for our families. Today was no special occasion, just the end of another Thursday afternoon gym class, a chance to get in a quick game of three-on-three before the final bell rang and my friends and I went home to cartoons and after-school snacks. Mr. Moustafa, the strict Egyptian phys ed instructor, stood on the far side of the auditorium, a white shirt tucked into loose black sweatpants, his back to the half of the court we occupied, guiding a group of uncoordinated girls through the motions of double Dutch. Craig and I sprinted together toward the long rebound, both putting hands on the ball at the very same time. Naturally more inclined to acts of aggression than me, at once Craig tugged hard at the ball. I bent my knees and held on firm, lurching forward and then drawing him back toward me, the ball tight between our chests. Our eyes met as we both registered that he had just failed in his attempt to wrench it loose from me. You’re a nigger, too, Thomas, aren’t you? I could hear him say as I took in his dark
blue eyes and that stupid blond sugar bowl rimming his face. I stepped forward into Craig and the ball as hard as I could and let go of both of them. He stumbled backward and the edge of the stage jammed into the rear of his rib cage. He collapsed, coughing for breath. A freckled boy named Sean, the spitting image of the MAD magazine mascot, ran over to Craig while the other boys stood off to the side. “You OK, Craig?” Craig was red in the face, wheezing, but nodded in the affirmative.“Jesus, what’d you do that for, Thomas?” Sean said, looking up at me.

  “’Cause I felt like it, bitch—what the fuck you gonna do about it?” I said, molding my face into my best rendition of the kind of mean mug I had been seeing a lot of on Saturdays in Plainfield. I had never said anything like that before to anyone, and I felt strange doing it. If either Craig or Sean would have just gone across the gym to Mr. Moustafa and told on me, I would have repented right then and there. As it turned out, though, and to my surprise, neither of them did any such thing. We were all about ten years old and roughly the same strength and size. But they just shrank and walked away from me, as though I were somehow much bigger than that. That was so damn easy, I thought to myself. When the bell rang, I gathered my things and walked off, too.

  Those days, as I was learning to project a certain kind of blackness, I was also coming to understand that it is not simply a means of protection—it can be a real weapon, too.There is an undeniably seductive power that black boys who grow up around white boys and pay attention can exploit in the state of nature that is grade school and the playground. Of course, this kind of power is the power of Caliban, but as a child, I didn’t know that sort of thing. All I knew was this: If they, the white boys, found me, the black boy, credibly black enough, everything was gravy.