Shortly before I was due to come home for Christmas break that year, I got an early Saturday morning phone call from Pappy. He tried to ask me how I was doing, but by his tone I could tell that he was not all right. What’s going on, what’s wrong? I asked him. He began to say what had happened at home the night before.
Clarence, who lived in the basement of the house, was coming back from his job at a law firm around ten or eleven p.m. As he parked his car in front of the driveway, a Fanwood Police Department patrol vehicle pulled up behind him, lights flashing, and two young officers of Irish and Italian stock hopped out. The policemen had been parked and waiting around the corner for who knows how long. They approached Clarence, who was still in his office clothes, and told him to stay right where he was. Because Fanwood is such a small town and because my brother had collected a lot of traffic violations in his day, he knew at least one of the officers by name, and the officer knew him as well.
“What’s the problem, Officer?” Clarence said, lighting a cigarette and leaning against the side of his used silver Taurus.
“We have a warrant for your arrest here, Clarence,” one of the officers taunted.
“What for?”
“Looks like you have an outstanding traffic ticket and you forgot to show up for court,” the officer said.
“Ah, right, but there’s been a misunderstanding,” Clarence explained. “I did have a mandatory court appearance back on September 12, but with all the confusion over 9/11, government agencies shut down that day. The courts were closed, but the thing is that their computers were still up and running and so everyone with a date for the twelfth—me included—was automatically issued a bench warrant for their arrest.When court reopened on the thirteenth, notices were sent out recalling those bench warrants. I have that paperwork inside; I can go and get it for you.”
“That’s not necessary, you’re going to have to come to the station and settle it there. But don’t worry, you can spend the night,” the officer said, and laughed.
“But there’s no need to go to the station,” Clarence said.“I have the paperwork right here—I’ll go and get it.” Clarence began to walk up the short driveway towards the garage door. The officers told him to stop. Clarence flicked his cigarette, kept walking and opened the garage door. As he began to step inside the garage, one of the officers grabbed him.
“Let me go,” Clarence said,“I’m just going to get the paperwork, there’s been a misunderstanding, I can show you.”
“There’s no misunderstanding,” replied the officer.
“Fine, let me just call the station, then, and speak directly to a commanding officer,” Clarence said reaching for his cell phone.
“Put your phone away now!” the officer shouted. Sensing that something was off and beginning to feel afraid, Clarence panicked and tried to close the garage door between him and the two policemen. Both officers stepped up. As my brother pulled down the door, one of the officers shoved him; as he stumbled, the other took his steel Maglite, cocked back his arm, and in one heavy swing, relieved Clarence of two front teeth. They scattered across the oil-stained floor like dropped Chiclets. My brother, who always has had a frightening tolerance for pain, screamed for them to get the fuck up off him. Refusing to fall, he struggled with both officers who were intent on wrestling him to the ground and they pushed him through the door separating the garage from the basement proper.
Pappy, who had been dozing in his bedroom, was awakened by the commotion directly beneath him and rushed downstairs. What he saw as he descended the staircase were two white policemen on top of his defenseless black son, now stretched on his back on the cold basement floor and fully within his own home. One officer had Clarence pinned with a shin across the throat and was pounding his head against the cement floor; the other held his legs. Clarence, his mouth swollen, purple, and streaming blood, continued to rain curses on both of them.
“Now, you wait just a minute!” Pappy shouted as he entered. It is of the utmost importance to stress here that my father was sixty-five years old at the time—a senior citizen, with not only gray but also white hair—and he would have been dressed, like Clarence, in khaki pants or wool slacks, a dress shirt, a tie, glasses, and a sweater vest. But instead of calming down when an older man came in the room, one of those two heroes, the one who had Clarence by the legs, sprang up to his feet and drew his weapon.
“He put his gun in my face in my own goddamn home!” Pappy said into the phone, breathing hard enough that I became worried he would have a heart attack.“I’ve never broken the law in my life and this white boy pulls his gun on me.”
I tried to calm my father over the phone, but there was too much going on, too much baggage, too much symbolism involved in the exchange he was describing.
“And do you know, son,” Pappy said—in a tone of voice that I have not heard from him before or since, choking on his words—“I had a choice: I either watch these bastards beat my own son into the pavement or get killed slugging one of them and you and your mother are left in a hell of a fix . . . Son, I’d rather die . . .”
His voice broke, and for only the second time in my life, I heard my father cry. It is the most painful sound in the world, the sound of one’s father’s tears. Pappy’s weeping lasted only a few seconds; he mastered himself as quickly as he had lost it. But those few seconds will echo through me for the rest of my life.
He began again, speaking calmly and under control.“Then your mother came downstairs, and she had the cordless phone in her hand; she had called the lawyer and the neighbors and they were calling the police station.”
“How did it end?” I asked.
Pappy told me many things that boiled down to the following: They put Clarence in cuffs and took him to the station, his teeth stayed behind on the floor. As for the relevant paperwork detailing the change of date, it was right there on the nightstand, about fifteen feet away. (The town where the warrant originated later confirmed to the Fanwood police that the warrant had been issued erroneously.)
Was it foolish of Clarence to speed and get a ticket in the first place? Yes, it was. And it was probably also exceedingly bad judgment on his part to attempt to enter the house—regardless of whether there was proof inside of a change of date—after the policemen instructed him not to. I cannot dispute that. But try as hard as I can—and I have tried—I fail to see any way that this could have happened to any of our white neighbors, in their own homes and over an infraction so venial as a traffic ticket. It is simply unimaginable.
I don’t think I will ever be rid of the visceral contempt and disdain I feel for the police. I have never felt safe around these undereducated and overly armed men whose job, supposedly, is to protect and serve. And I’ve never sought to delude myself out of seeing the racism that exists all around me. It is there for the seeing. And yet, be all of that as it may, this experience affected me primarily as a family tragedy, as a personal grief, not as a racial one. It never did hit me the way it hit Pappy. What fucked up my head for days was my awareness of Pappy’s pain, that these two pigs had tracked their dirt and mud into our home, had desecrated my father’s personal space and force-fed him fresh morsels of white-on-black injustice—just the kind of morsels he has been struggling his entire life to digest.
I hated these bastards not because I felt powerless against them—on the contrary, I felt superior to the brutes—I knew what they were like and what they went home to and what kind of rent they paid just as well as I knew that at the age of twenty and with tanned skin and wooly hair, I could already go places where these white men could not go. I hated these uniformed thugs not because they had beat my brother (though I hated them for that, too)—but because they had made my father the victim. This experience hurt and infuriated Clarence—and we are thankful that he did not go and get a gun and try to avenge himself on one of those cowards, as my mother and I feared he might—but he told me that it never diminished his self-confidence or led him to conclude that as a b
lack man this must be it. The truth here, the hard, inequitable truth, is that Clarence and I actually are freer than Pappy. Though we experience racism—sometimes even violently—it simply fails to define us as it might have had we been born just two or three decades sooner. This struck me as both deeply tragic and extremely hopeful.
When I returned to school in January, Playboy had dropped out for the second and final time, was living somewhere near the Assemblée Nationale in Paris, and most of my other friends were studying abroad, from Buenos Aires to New Zealand. I now understood the importance of getting out of one’s backyard, understood it well, but because I had received such low marks my first year, I couldn’t afford any semesters off from Georgetown. For all intents and purposes, I had already taken my leave as a freshman, and so I stayed in D.C. trying to pull up my GPA as high as mathematically was still possible.
Charles didn’t have these problems—he had a real talent for economics and had gotten himself into a prestigious exchange program at Cambridge. He was gone, too, and now I really felt left behind. To compensate, I got a passport of my own and arranged to visit him and Josh and Rusty in London that spring break. Having not yet completed Georgetown’s basic foreign-language requirement, I also enrolled in a study-abroad program in France for the summer. I could have taken all the coursework I needed at Rutgers and saved myself a lot of student-loan debt in the process, but I had been living with a gnawing sense of unease that semester—a feeling my trip to London would only intensify—a kind of vague, undefined longing. A longing for what, I couldn’t say. All I knew was that I had to go abroad and that it would cost me far more if I did not go.
Back at what seemed to me a very quiet Georgetown, I bided my time playing pickup basketball with Pup and endless hours of chess with my old roommate, Bryan. Academically, I pushed myself harder than ever. I met a very kind and serious philosopher from the Flemish-speaking side of Belgium, a Hegel scholar named Wilfried Ver Eecke. Dr. Ver Eecke—a balding man with thick accent and jowls, who looked anachronistically like a philosopher, always in a gray three-piece suit and almost always in his office, working— took me under his wing and agreed to teach me The Phenomenology of Spirit on a one-on-one basis. He cautioned beforehand that it was, in his opinion, “probably the most difficult book in the world.”As such, we agreed that we would focus our attention those months on one section in particular, a section I wanted badly to comprehend, a section Hegel called the Master-Slave Dialectic.
The Master-Slave Dialectic begins as a kind of imagined narrative or myth, which Hegel devised in order to explain on a highly abstract level how mere life, conscious life, might have made the staggering leap to become self-conscious life—or life that is aware of itself, subjective, “I.” It develops into the story of what happens when two “I”s meet each other, when “the-I-that-is-I” encounters “the-I-that-is-other” and both attempt to assert themselves. It becomes the story of a life-and-death struggle, of a fight for recognition , of an unequal relationship that necessarily ensues.
To say that this is heavy stuff is the definition of understatement. I labored for months with Dr. Ver Eecke as my guide, trying to follow Hegel’s elusive thought around the darkened Teutonic woods. The pursuit exhausted and challenged me in ways my teacher, a European man, could not understand. It challenged me emotionally. As a descendant of real slaves, my interest in the topic was instinctively more than academic—whereas Dr. Ver Eecke, through no fault of his own, felt it all in his head, through no fault of my own, I felt it in my bones. I felt, perhaps, a touch of ancestral shame. Above all, as a black student of philosophy at Georgetown, I felt profoundly alone. I had no one, not one black person I could talk to about what I was reading and thinking, about Hegel’s concept of bondage in particular and about philosophy in general. I was the only black person in the department—student or faculty—and that was that. It is difficult to take a topic that hits home the way slavery does for blacks and twist it around in your mind theoretically, dispassionately, in the abstract, counterintuitively, but that is what I ended up having to do in the absence of anyone to speak with emotionally. This, though, I think, was ultimately for the better. I pried myself from my emotion and my history and let Hegel have his say. What he said turned me upside down.
For Hegel, it is actually the slave who comes out on top in the long run. In that initial life-and-death struggle, which sets the terms going forward, one “I” experiences what Hegel calls the “fear of death” and submits to the other. This “I” decides he “loves life” and concedes the fight. And this initially submissive consciousness, the slave consciousness, on pain of death, now serves the other’s will and works for him. But it is through this very work that, eventually, he will come to surpass his master, Hegel reasons. On a basic level, this is so because it is the slave who masters objective reality, or nature. The slave takes the plants and animals and transforms them, through work, into meals; the slave transforms, with his hands, a tree into a table; the slave is most alive, becomes necessary, develops his spirit. The master, on the other hand, is parasitic, decadent, dependent. Without the slave’s recognition, he is not even a master; without the slave’s work, he cannot prosper.
I realized that Hegel was not really thinking about flesh-and-blood men and women here, nor was he probably concerned at all with the curious case of the American Negro. On the contrary, he was thinking about such abstractions as the progression of Mind through History toward the Absolute. The particular and the personal were of little consequence to him. He was contemplating societal evolution on an extremely grand scale, and he was seeing the Master-Slave Dialectic as on the verge of finding its resolution not through a man like Abraham Lincoln, but through a man like Napoléon Bonaparte, through the imperial implementation of constitutional monarchy in Europe. In other words, Hegel was thinking about men becoming citizens, but he was not thinking about black folk marching in Alabama.
Of course, it was hard for me to see how my great-great-grandfather, Shadrach—a man bought (or bred, who knows?) and legally owned by a certain Jones family of Louisiana, like a head of cattle—would not have taken exception to Hegel’s reasoning here, were he given the opportunity and ability to read and rebut. Could a slave ever reach this kind of conclusion? I wondered. The idea struck me as either insane or a joke. And yet, the more I thought about it—that those who have been subjugated might actually over time be able to gain something from that subjugation—the more I struggled with this idea from my comfortable swivel chair, armed with the space and perspective I was fortunate enough to have been granted, the more I found it difficult to dismiss as simply false.
Meanwhile, hip-hop music remained my daily bread, same as always. I woke up to the beat, and it was on when I went to sleep at night. Even as I drifted further and further away from the culture and its priorities, the music I found to be much more difficult to escape. When Jay-Z’s The Blueprint album dropped earlier that year, my roommates and I got our hands on a leaked copy a few weeks early and knocked it all day, every day for a month or two. I pumped it as hard or even harder than my friends did, listening to “Girls, Girls, Girls” so many times some of them asked me to stop. But by that point something basic had changed in my response to the music, and irreparably so. Whereas before I could whittle away entire afternoons with Charles, marveling at Jay-Z’s perspicacity, at his cleverness with words or his unflinching insight into the human condition, I now found I could no longer get myself so worked up about it, as many of my friends—including my white friends—still could do. I listened to the music, and I listened to it a lot, but it became nearly impossible for me to be impressed with it on anything approaching a deeper level, to see rappers like Jay-Z and Nas and the Wu-Tang Clan, or even Mos Def and Talib Kweli, in the light I used to see them and so many still do: as something more than entertainers and petty egoists, as something akin to autodidact philosophers and thinkers, as role models and guides, as “black people CNN.” I couldn’t do it, not once I actually
had some philosophy under my belt and was getting into the habit of thinking for and informing myself. In fact, the only thing that amazed me anymore was the idea that I had ever been so taken by these people in the past or had thought that they were somehow “kicking knowledge.”
As the year wound down, I used to stop by at Bryan’s apartment on Wisconsin just about every day. The place, a two-bedroom walk-up, with a futon, a TV, a PlayStation 2, and two turntables and a mixer in the living room, was small and sparse but always a good time. Bryan shared it with a recent Georgetown grad named Ted. As far as I could tell, Ted’s life revolved around four things in no particular order: smoking ganja, playing chess, listening to rap, and studying for the LSAT. I didn’t know anyone else who wanted to play chess as badly as Ted did, and over that we bonded. The three of us—Bryan, Ted, and I—used to hold down marathon sessions with Ted’s rollout chessboard, which he bought at the U.S. Chess Center over in Dupont, and which Bryan would spread out over the cardboard box he used as a table on these occasions. Mainly, Ted and I played game after game and Bryan provided the soundtrack.
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