Losing My Cool

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

  An infectious and indefatigable bedroom DJ, Bryan would light up a spliff or two or three and weave together hours-long mixes of Boot Camp Clik,Wu-Tang Clan, and Rawkus Records tracks from his booth in the corner. Over the course of these evenings, Bryan and Ted would say things to each other like: “Yo, God, what’s the science?” They talked about “chessboxin’” and “the dun language” and “blessing poly sessions.” In certain ways it seemed to me as if they were even more into hip-hop than my black friends were back home. But both of these two white boys were also strong students with significantly higher GPAs than mine. I wondered how they could compartmentalize their hip-hop experience so neatly, not let it interfere with their schoolwork or their careers, in a way that many of my black friends and I couldn’t do. Bryan was from a background no more privileged than mine and certainly far less elite than Will’s. How come he had never tried to smack a bitch or pack a gat? I asked myself. How come he didn’t think that homework was wack or have a baby like Stacey did? How come he didn’t have the same problems so many of us were having?

  One of the main reasons, it dawned on me, is that too many blacks do not approach hip-hop ironically. Whites and other non-blacks like Bryan and Ted enjoy the very real pleasures of the music while avoiding the many pitfalls of the culture precisely because they listen with a sense of irony. For my black friends and me, there was nothing ironic about the business of keeping it real. Quite the opposite—this is what many of us were most sincere about.

  When Bryan speaks of “keeping it thorough” or “holding it down” or “representing,” it means something very different from what it means when someone like RaShawn says the same thing. In one case it is funny and innocuous, metaphorical; in another it is literal, terrifying, and homicidal. RaShawn, that childhood idol of mine, was not being ironic in the least when he bumped The Chronic in Forest Road Park and Dr. Dre rapped evocatively about letting the hollow-points pop. The violence and criminality of RaShawn’s life-style went hand-in-hand with the rap lyrics he earnestly embraced, and with the miserable street culture those lyrics evoked in such garish detail. RaShawn had none of the necessary psychological detachment and emotional remove that Bryan could bring with him to the interaction. RaShawn saw himself in these songs, whereas Bryan simply came to appreciate hip-hop in the way that, say, someone not from India might come to appreciate yoga. Regardless of his enthusiasm for hip-hop, there could never be any question of whether Bryan might actually belong to the street culture that produced it. The truth is that he couldn’t, and no one would ever expect him to—hence the irony of his adoption of this peculiar language and set of manners. No, Bryan was into hip-hop, I realized, but he wasn’t of it; sadly, RaShawn was of it even more than he was into it.

  Without intending to, I had begun to listen to hip-hop with the ears of a stranger. I first realized this in a car coming back from the Jersey Shore with Charles and Betrys and a friend of Betrys’s from Tokyo named Jenny. The four of us were in good spirits after having spent the afternoon sipping cold beers on the porch of my friend Chris’s beach house and lying on the sand. Chris was two years behind me at Georgetown and we had become friends that summer in France, where we both took language courses in Tours. The girls and Charles and I had taken our leave of Chris, and I was inching along the Parkway, stuck in the crush of Sunday evening beach traffic, with Betrys up front next to me, and Charles and Jenny in the back. Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt played on the stereo and we all were quiet, listening to the rapper who called himself “Jay-Hovah” as if to the Sermon on the Mount.

  This had been one of my favorite albums as a teenager. I played it so much in high school on my Walkman and in my bedroom that I eventually snapped the tape in the cassette. This afternoon the record still sounded good to me in the way that only a record that embodies all the mixed-up hopes, dreams, emotions, lust, swagger, naïveté, arrogance, innocence, and aspiration of a specific, irreproducible youthful moment can sound good. Which is to say, it had the sweet sound of nostalgia in it. But when I heard it now, heard “the god MC” narrate the glories of street life and state so matter-of-factly that “all us blacks got is sports and entertainment” and “thievin’,” and when I heard him boast about his underworld ties and how the high price of leather and fur had him “deeper than ever” in the drug game, I must have kind of chuckled or something. It seemed to me to be silly on its face now.

  The fact that until that moment I had been nodding my head along in solemnity also struck me as, well, ironic. What did Jay-Z’s gritty take have to do with our present reality? Charles had just come home from half a year spent in the company of Cambridge dons and was starting a lofty summer internship on the trading floor at J. P. Morgan, Betrys and Jenny could read kanji, for heaven’s sake, and I had just returned from a two-month stay in the hôtel particulier of an old French aristocrat who cooked steak dinners for me. Of the five of us that day, Jenny and Chris were not black; Charles and Betrys and I were. I could see very little distinction among any of our lives right then: We all had prospects beyond sports or thievin’ or drug hustling. Yet somehow for Charles and Betrys and me, that was what was supposedly “real.”

  All of this was going through my head when, with my foot on the brake, I looked over at Betrys and made a sarcastic comment at the Jigga Man’s expense. He had rapped something about consuming fine wines and issuing vintage flows.

  “I bet if you blindfolded Jay-Z, he couldn’t tell the difference between a red and a white,” I said. Betrys and Jenny laughed, but Charles got annoyed with me as though I had insulted a friend.

  “Why couldn’t he? What, you have to have lived in France to be able to do that?” he said.

  “Oh, come on, man, just picture Jay-Z in a cave in Vouvray or Rheims, doing a tasting . . .” The girls continued to laugh.

  “I don’t see what’s so funny about that,” he said.

  “Huh?” I said, letting the question of Jay-Z’s interest in viticulture drop, not understanding why it had ever become so serious in the first place. I kind of just looked back at my friend through the rearview in disbelief. Maybe he was just playing devil’s advocate with me, arguing for the sake of arguing, but I took his dissatisfaction at face value. I simply couldn’t see how any of us could claim to relate to Jay-Z in earnest anymore; doing so now seemed a sort of bad faith because who Jay-Z spoke for wasn’t who we were. But for Charles there seemed to be nothing ironic about Jay-Z or the life he represented and put forth to the world as our black reality. Though Charles certainly couldn’t be considered to live in this reality anymore, it somehow remained sacrosanct to him nonetheless. Whatever irony there may have been here, it was lost on my friend, same as I imagine it must be lost on other highly successful hip-hop generation black men like Jay-Z and Russell Simmons—men who make their incredible fortunes legally and are a very safe distance from the street life they so sincerely revere. For extremely smart and talented men like Charles (and like Jay-Z and Russell Simmons, too), perhaps this is not such a big deal. Certainly Charles was in no more danger of going out like RaShawn than I was. But Charles was a real oddity—a kind of cultural centaur, half ’hood superstar and half Cambridge boy—and the thing I started to realize as I contemplated my friend’s dexterous ability to both thrive wildly and keep it real was that I have met a hell of a lot more RaShawns in my life than Charleses.

  I wished I could explain all this to him, what I was thinking, but it wouldn’t have been any use. For Charles, it came down as it always did to an unstated question of allegiance, and one ought to be loyal above all else, including being truthful: to family, to other blacks, to one’s past, even to the street. He wouldn’t budge.

  I began to sense that, being black, there were just things I wasn’t allowed to say about my culture or my tribe. This thought had not occurred to me before. The traffic on the Parkway hardly budged for miles and it was a very long drive home that night. I don’t think Charles and I saw each other again the rest of the summer.

>   CHAPTER NINE

  Every Secret Loses Its Force

  An atmosphere of siege hung over Washington at the start of my senior year at Georgetown. Nerves were still raw from the previous September and the fear of terrorism was palpable wherever you went.The country was at war in one Muslim country and it looked ever more likely that we would be at war in a second one, too. Osama bin Laden’s trail had long gone cold somewhere in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his organization, Al-Qaeda, released videotaped threats and taunts with seeming impunity. People, old and young, white and black, were on edge, to put it mildly. And then the bodies started dropping.

  For twenty-two days straight, all up and down Interstate 95, a sniper lurked, picking off victims apparently at random. No one was spared: a thirteen-year-old student arriving at middle school, a seventy-two-year-old retired carpenter walking up Georgia Avenue, a bus driver taking a stretch on the steps of his bus, a woman vacuuming her car, a landscaper mowing a lawn, a part-time taxi driver fueling up, a Home Depot shopper walking to her car, a babysitter reading a book on a bench, a man pumping gas at a Sunoco station, a man pumping gas at an Exxon station, a diner coming out of a Ponderosa steakhouse, a woman unloading groceries into her car, another woman unloading shopping bags into her minivan. All were shot from a distance, each with a single bullet, ten fatally so.

  For weeks, all the police could say was that they believed the killer was driving an unmarked white van. You don’t realize how many unmarked white vans there are in a major metropolitan area until you begin to believe that they are shooting at you. Unmarked white vans are like taxi cabs or Toyota Camrys—they’re everywhere. I remember scuttling back and forth to class that October, looking over my shoulder, spotting a white painter’s van parked somewhere down Prospect Street, and feeling my heartbeat quicken and my muscles tense as I half braced myself to get clapped in the back. Rusty, Josh, and I were sharing an apartment together on M and Bank Streets, with a big picture window overlooking the bustle of M Street and the Key Bridge in the distance. We were all bothered enough that we kept the shades drawn when we got home from class and glued ourselves to the local news, which often was bizarre. All over the Beltway, from Maryland to Virginia, you would see these images of motorists at gas stations, ducking and hiding while fueling their cars, poking their heads up from behind their trunks, glancing around for ghastly white vans, anxiously awaiting either the pop of the pump or the gat, whichever came first. The world, it seemed, was an unhinged and inhospitable place. Even after John Allen Muhammad and Lee Malvo were apprehended and exposed as blue Chevy Caprice drivers, it was a long time before I stopped counting all the white vans around me.

  In spite of all this—or perhaps because of it—I felt a heightened vigor and thirst for life, of a level which I had not previously known. I really was aware, maybe for the first time, that I was alive, and, more than that, that I was not just alive but even living well. I was aware, when I walked, of the ground beneath my feet. Fresh from a summer spent mostly in France, I was aware that I had traveled a very long way from Unisex Hair Creationz, Forest Road Park, and Union Catholic. Those two short months in another country and another language had recalibrated my inner compass in ways that lingered with me. I was aware now that I had floated in the Mediterranean and sipped an orange pressée at the Closerie des Lilas and seen the sun set in Montmartre. I was aware, above all, and at long last, that the world was a broad and grand place and that I was equal to and worthy of my surroundings wherever I went. I was also aware that no one, white or black, could take that from me. I cannot overstate the importance of this realization.

  In class, I was engrossed in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Out of class, I spent a lot of hours with Josh at the Barnes & Noble down on M Street, in the second-floor coffee shop, exploiting the generous reading policy, trying to absorb everything and anything I could get my hands on and poring over piles of magazines, anything from Wallpaper* and Vanity Fair to The Economist and Harper’s. It was in the November 2002 issue of this last that I happened on an article published under the subtitle “The Disappearance of the Black Individual,” written by a black professor at Stanford named Shelby Steele. I hadn’t heard of Steele, but I flipped to his article and began reading, and what I read, to my surprise, seemed to be speaking to me directly, dovetailing with some of the very dense Heidegger I was struggling through and distilling all that German thought, oddly, into something distinctly black and extremely personal.

  I was trying very hard in those days—with the whipped-up fervor of the redeemed or recently converted—to live out with seriousness what Socrates had called the examined life. By the time I encountered Heidegger at Georgetown, I felt, if not like a real philosopher, then at least like I was beginning to be an honest student of the subject. I was on the scent of philosophizing now and I felt that, with enough hard work and time, I could one day be a philosopher in the only sense of the word that mattered to my father—in the sense that I might ask serious questions and then use the answers to try to live a better life. My adherence to Pappy’s interpretation of philosophy led me to take whatever it was that I was reading much more seriously outside of the classroom than even inside it. And this is probably why I was never able to become very interested in analytic philosophy, that cloistered, academic esotery that denies the possibility of deeper truth, and which all too often has given up asking the question “How ought I live?” “How ought I live?” was really the only question I wanted to find an answer to, and I looked for it in everything I read.

  The more I read, the more I noticed that Pappy’s problem of running with donkeys and mules had become a recurring theme in the literature I consumed: The psychologists spoke of “the group,” Nietzsche of “the herd,” and Sartre said, simply, “Hell is other people.” Nowhere, though, did I find the issue described so forcefully as in Heidegger’s exploration of the “They.” The basic idea is this: Since we all live in the company of other people, all individual human life (“being-there”) is really social life (“being-with”). And this social life (“being-with-one-another”) is defined by “distantiality”—an individual’s endless concern with the distance of his own practices from the accepted practices of his community. Distantiality is something like the pressure people feel to keep it real, a pressure that puts all of us, as individuals, in a state of constant subjection to others, the They, who decide what is and is not acceptable in the community. When we try to determine who They are, we realize that They are nobody. They are not definite. Like agents in The Matrix, anyone in the group can be the They at any given time and the They is never anyone in particular. It is generic and, as a result, extremely difficult to pin down or challenge. And this is decisive: The sheer inconspicuousness of the domination—most of the time we don’t even notice it—is what makes it so powerful. Heidegger calls this invisible influence the “dictatorship of the They” and it is precisely what Pappy was afraid of when he wondered aloud about locking his thoroughbred away.

  I was thinking about Heidegger when I began reading Shelby Steele. Early in the Harper’s essay, he summarizes a movie seen in his youth that has left a deep impression on him. The movie is Paris Blues, and the setting is early 1960s Paris. The action takes place in the smoky Left Bank cafés and basement nightclubs for which the city was famous in the Jazz Age. One of the four main characters is a man named Eddie, played by Sidney Poitier, who begins to undergo a deep internal conflict. Eddie has fled to Paris, like so many black American artists and intellectuals of his generation, to develop his musical gifts and to escape the stifling racism that haunts him back home. At first he is very happy for having made his move. A romance ensues with a beautiful black teacher named Connie, played by Diahann Carroll. Things go well and Eddie becomes a staunch proponent of expatriation as a way of life for the black American. While he’s walking down the Champs-Elysées, it occurs to Eddie that he never wants to leave Paris. Paris for Eddie is synonymous with freedom,America with hel
l. But Connie has not expatriated to Paris, she has come on vacation, and with her she brings news of the Civil Rights movement that is unfolding at home. As Eddie and Connie fall deeper in love, Connie makes it increasingly clear to Eddie that their future together lies not in Europe, but in the struggle going on in America. In one fell swoop, Connie presents Eddie with the very thing he is in flight from: the idea that group identity takes precedence over individual freedom.

  Eddie rejects this idea and, as Steele sees it, it would be simplistic of us to write off his reaction as somehow ignoble or ungenerous. For Eddie already has won in Paris the very freedom that blacks in the States lack and are fighting for. And he has this freedom as the direct result of having understood himself not as a member of any racial group but as an individual who is free to make his own choices. Even if blacks were to win the fight back home, true freedom still would mean that individuals would have to make their own choices. Why, then, should Eddie wish to leave Paris for the brutalities of America, Steele wonders.The movie ends inconclusively, with Eddie promising to join Connie back in the States, but staying behind to arrange his affairs in Paris as her train pulls out of the station.

  As I read, I was enthralled. I could see Heidegger in concrete terms through Steele, who now shifted his exploration of the dilemma away from the movies and into the historical record. Eddie’s unresolved fictional dilemma achieved its real-life denouement in the artistic life of James Baldwin, who in the 1940s swapped tenement living in Harlem for bohemian poverty in Paris and Switzerland, where he found—or better yet, created—himself as a writer. In Europe, crucially, he was able to come to terms with himself—as a Negro, as a homosexual, as an artist, as an American, as an unloved son—in ways that he could not while he was at home. James Baldwin became a huge success in Europe and it was clear to everyone including himself that his escape from America was instrumental in this, both artistically and existentially.