“Oh yeah?” I said, laughing.
“Hell yeah! All those times in the summer when it was nice as fuck out, and everyone was outside chilling, and you were just stuck inside studying. I used to feel bad for you and really wonder how you put up with that.”
“I know. I used to wonder the same thing.”
“Yeah, but all that studying paid off, man, and I’m proud of you.”
I thanked Sam for his kind words. I wasn’t sure when I’d see him again, so I told him that I loved him. It was past midnight now and as I walked up to my house, I could see through the picture window that Pappy’s reading lamp was still lit. He was at his desk when I opened the door, underlining some pages in a book.
“You know, I just keep returning to Barzun, over and over again,” he said, glancing up. He had taken an evening shower and looked fresh. “He really is a fine mind and you should read him.” I pulled up a chair at the desk and we spoke for a moment about From Dawn to Decadence.
“Well, you’ll be heading off soon, I guess,” Pappy said, shifting gears.
“Yeah,” I said, “it’s getting close now.” I didn’t really know what to say. The truth is Pappy had not wanted me to go to France, and he had made that clear. His preference was for me to go straight through to graduate school and to get another degree before life had a chance to get in the way. I was defying him by going like this. But he had come to accept the fact that he taught me for years to think for myself and that this was the consequence. He had conceded the argument a long time ago.
“Well, let’s play chess,” he said, pounding the desk with his fist and smiling.
“Yeah, sure, Babe,” I said, getting up to clear the desk for the board and looking at my father. Sometimes when he is sitting like this at his desk with a certain half-smile on his lips, and with his big, bald head and his hand balled tight into a fist, Pappy can look the way he does in certain pictures from his childhood. He looked that way to me right then, like a child. For a moment, I just watched him, and thoughts rushed through me. Just knowing where Pappy had come from, knowing from books and television a little bit about that period of the American century he had passed through with dark skin, standing there realizing that this man who looked like a child right then had never really gotten to be a child, had never had a father, I felt humbled and overwhelmed with pride in Pappy and I told him so.
“I’m so proud of you, Babe,” I said, and he looked at me kind of surprised. He couldn’t have known what was going through my mind, and my comment must have seemed to come from out of the blue.
“Oh, well, you just make sure you tell your grandkids about me. Tell ’em their great-grandpappy wasn’t such a terrible man after all,” he joked.
“Oh, I’ll tell them about you!” I said.“I’ll tell them you made me read books all day and play chess all night.” We both laughed. I set down the board and asked Pappy which color he wanted, though I already knew the answer.
“Black, Thomas Chatterton,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to be black.”
Epilogue
I
Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia (“I am myself and my circumstance”), José Ortega y Gasset wrote before being forced to flee Franco’s Spain and enter into years of exile in Argentina. I encountered this deceptively simple sentence while living and working in France. It was a time, just after graduating college, when my own circumstances were diverging drastically from those I had known as a child growing up in New Jersey—a time when I was thinking seriously about that fact, about who I was and where I was headed. Those little epiphanies I had imagined and wished for while reading Shelby Steele’s Harper’s essay had begun to hit me and, like Eddie, I was understanding on an almost physical level that awesome boundlessness a black American can feel outside of America. I was also realizing that we simply do not often see ourselves very accurately on our own and it is only through other people that we glimpse or comprehend our own situations or selves. These others sometimes come to us in the form of wise authors and compelling characters (real or fictitious), and sometimes as ordinary people whom we meet and know in everyday life. When we are lucky, these different sources of revelation converge into one stream of truth and we really do see ourselves, as we are or have been. This convergence happened in a notable way for me on two separate occasions in France.
On the first, which took place soon after my arrival, as often happens in a foreign country I found myself hanging out at a perfect stranger’s home. He was a literature student named Stéphane, with whom I had some friends in common. A couple of us ended up at his place one night after dinner. “What would you like to drink?” Stéphane asked me, playing some music on his CD player.
“What do you have?” I said.
“There is some beer, a little red wine, and I have a bit of Armagnac, as well.” Louis Armstrong’s trumpet and raspy voice belted from the speakers, flooding the room with New Orleans.
“Armagnac, please,” I said, and he returned with a bottle and several glasses. We sipped the brandy slowly, enjoying the jazz. Everyone in the room—all Franco-French white kids, it occurred to me—knew their Louis Armstrong inside and out, knew the names of the songs, had their favorites. That is phenomenal, I thought.
“How do you guys know so much about black music?” I asked.
“Are you kidding?” Stéphane, replied, assuming, I think, that I was implying only an American could be so well versed. “This is something the whole world knows. Practically everything except classical is black music!” I refilled my glass with the brandy, which, I noticed, tasted an awful lot like Hennessy—better, though.
It’s strange, I began to think, None of the black kids I grew up with would have said something like that. “Practically everything except classical is black music.” I thought of the way we all referred to house music as white, or of the way no one even knew George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic were largely from Plainfield. It was a restricted way of understanding things—kind of like the way no one ever drank brandy that wasn’t Hennessy. I explained to Stéphane that he had got me wrong: I was giving him props—it was not true that the whole world knew these things.
The second time such a convergence happened was near the end of my stay. My friends Shadik and Shadir, along with Josh, had come to visit, and I took them to Paris for the weekend. The twins had never left the country before and they were as awestruck as I had been when I first saw another part of the world. After a day spent crisscrossing the Seine, strolling Saint-Germain, staring at the Louvre—“That’s where the kings used to live, right?”—sitting in the gardens, darting in and out of the bookstores, clothing stores, and pastry shops, the four of us decided to end the evening on the rue Saint-Honoré with a bottle of wine at Hôtel Costes.
We went inside and got a table in one of the back rooms next to what Josh thought was a well-known Brazilian Formula One race-car driver and across from a big party of celebrating Arabs. A statuesque black waitress, who looked a lot like Grace Jones but with long, straightened hair, brought a bottle of Bordeaux and some square plates of olives for us to pick at. Bossa nova and electronic tango music complemented the surroundings the way the cerignolas did the wine. All day the twins had been soaking up the city, wowed repeatedly by its splendor and grace. Now they were visibly tired.We sank into our seats and talked, with the certainty of young people who are just learning something, about the importance of getting out and seeing things. Everyone was in agreement about this. But the more we talked and the more the room filled with some rather entitled-looking people who appeared as if they had seen plenty of the world themselves, the more the strange and foreign sounds mixed with the strange and unfamiliar tastes, I noticed that the expressions on the twins’ faces were changing, gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, from awe to uncertainty. “What is this music?” Shadir asked me. “Why have I never heard anything like this before?” We laughed, but he was serious.
“I’ve never even seen olives like these,” said Sh
adik. “Are they good?”
“Do you sometimes feel uncomfortable in spots like this?” Shadir asked, the questions coming one after the other.
“I never even knew spots like this existed,” Shadik said, staring at his drink.
After the initial everything-is-wonderful shock of the new had worn off, and wholly outside the range of their traditional points of reference, I could see that the twins were now beginning to feel like they were losing their footing. I knew exactly what that felt like, what they were going through right then. It wasn’t that they had come to Paris and developed an inferiority complex, concluding—voilà!—that what they really wanted was to be French, to be white; that that would somehow be better. It wasn’t anything close to that. In my experience, black people don’t often actually want to be white.
No, I knew what they were feeling right then, and it was something else. If you’re young and black today and lucky enough to get out and travel, see the world beyond your own little backyard, i nevitably it is going to strike you that you have been lied to. You have been straight-up lied to, and not just in the most obvious way—not just by Robert L. Johnson and the propaganda organ of BET or by the spokesmen for stereotypes, the Busta Rhymeses and the Gucci Manes. It’s worse than that; the swindling has gone down far closer to home.You have been lied to by people you have known personally, people you have trusted, your friends and your neighbors, your older siblings and your classmates, your cousins and your lovers. Whether that lie is born of simple ignorance masquerading as arrogance—a seductive ignorance, yes, but still only ignorance—or, worse, actual malice, matters little at the moment of your realization. All that matters at that moment is the lie itself, this fiction that says that for you and your kind alone an authentic existence is a severely limited one. You have been lied to (and for how long?) and now you know that you have been lied to and you can’t deny it and you are naked.
The twins, under the influence of a day of discovery and not a little wine, were going through this revelation in front of me, I could see it in their faces, their searching, contemplating faces, and I knew it at first glance because I had gone through it too, many times before. At last, they could see the lie, which they had never previously glimpsed; it was right there in the room with them, tethered over the table like a fluorescent helium balloon, and no more impenetrable than that—they could reach out and touch it, puncture it with a fork or a toothpick if they wanted. And that hurts.
Sitting there at Hôtel Costes or in the Jardin du Luxembourg or in the Tuileries or just at some humble neighborhood brasserie, where finally it occurs to you that a bloody piece of meat actually tastes good, or at Dean & Deluca, where you encounter your first baguette, you think to yourself: I kind of like this. “This” being cheese, or wine, or bread, or fresh spinach leaves. Or crossing your legs, or polite conversation, or Renaissance art, or serious books. Or music that is not rap, or curiosity, or cosmopolitanism—in short, education, edification, exposure, whatever you want to call it.That is, whatever it is you used to think wasn’t real, wasn’t strictly for the N.I.G.G.A.s. You think to yourself: If only someone had told me all this was out here, I might have paid better attention in school! You think to yourself: This isn’t fair. It gets you hot and vexed.
And then, all of a sudden, when you feel as if you can’t take it anymore, when you think there must be some exculpating explanation, some scenario that will allow you to pass the blame—it must be because you’re black and these things aren’t intended for people like you in the first place, that racism is what it’s really all about—some Malian or Sudanese (yes, Sudanese!) chick walks by, all ebony-complected, all elegant and arresting, fluent in French and English as well as some obscure tribal dialect, and you realize this isn’t a skin thing, a color thing, a hair-texture thing, or even a money thing anymore (your childhood was comfortable enough). No, this is a culture thing, and yours has limited and cheated you profoundly. And then the final realization: You have been lying to yourself all this time—The Supreme Lie—you have been an accomplice, a co-architect of your own ignorance. And that really hurts, because you’re not a dummy. I knew what they were feeling because I had felt it many times before. In the twins I could see myself, and long after they had left, I reflected on the stifling circumstances in which we’d all grown up.
II
And yet, as I sit here now, recounting those two nights several years ago—nights that really started this book for me—I am filled mostly with hope, not pessimism. Has there ever been a more exciting time than the present to be young and black in America? Overnight, it seems as though the vistas of circumstance have opened up for us dramatically: Suddenly, the most powerful man in the country is not white, he is black; and the most visible black person in the world is not a thug or entertainer, he is a nuanced thinker. I have asked my father many times how such a development makes him feel. “Son, you are living in a different world,” he says. “This is no longer my world. The question is: How does this make you feel?”
The more pressing question, though, is, How will this make subsequent generations of black people feel? Will such a twist in the American racial narrative prove powerful enough to alter the underlying laws that still govern day-to-day black life? Will we, at long last, allow ourselves to abandon the instinct to self-sabotage and the narcissistic glorification of our own failure? Will the fact of daily exposure to a black president in turn expose once and for all the lie that is and always has been keeping it real?
Since the dawn of the hip-hop era in the 1970s, black people have become increasingly freer and freer as individuals, with a wider range of possibilities spread out before us now than at any time in our past. Yet the circumstances of our collective life have degenerated in direct contrast to this fact, with a more impoverished vision of what it means to be black today than ever before. If these exciting new circumstances we now find ourselves in, of which our black president is the apotheosis, are to mean anything of lasting value, the zeitgeist (Hegel), the They (Heidegger), or whatever we might call it, this is going to have to change, too—and permanently.
It is more accurate to say, however, that the mood of black culture doesn’t need to change into something wholly new so much as it must simply find a way to reclaim what it once had. One of the most fascinating paradoxes the student of black history ever observes, as well as a tremendous justification for black pride, is the extent to which this culture, against all likelihood, has customarily embodied a joyful, soulful, affirming approach to life and not a spiritually bankrupt or self-defeating one. It is only very recently—basically within my brother’s lifetime, which is to say, the three and a half decades of the hip-hop era or, roughly, the post-Civil Rights era—that this has, in the main, ceased to be the case. In other words, it is only after the tremendous civil-rights victories of the ’60s, only after desegregation, only after affirmative action that black America has become so militantly provincial and wildly nihilistic.
Why has such undeniable societal progress been met with such obvious cultural regress? Why when external limitations have been—and still are being—lifted do we frantically search for replacement constraints to bring down on ourselves? Is this, ultimately, what slavery’s residue tastes like? Is this the legacy of Jim Crow? Or is it, as some do argue, that the black community simply fell apart with integration? Is white flight to blame here? Was it crack? Was it AIDS? Is there an inherent bias in the nation’s criminal justice system? Is it all of the above, just some toxic mix, or something else entirely? I am not a sociologist and do not presume to have a catchall theory; I only know what I have seen. Perhaps it is the case, as many have claimed, that hip-hop culture is nothing but the logical outcome of the profound and alienating experiences so many blacks have had in the great American cities in the decades following the Civil Rights movement. Perhaps it is simply the result of all that disillusionment all those blacks and their children surely must have felt. Perhaps this is true. Be that as it may, though, are w
e bound now to keep the alienation and disillusionment going; are we bound to keep this culture that was born in negativity running in perpetuity?
In college it tripped me out to think that Hegel could have understood the slave and not the master as the ascendant consciousness. Unlikely as it may seem, though, many blacks in the past have seen things this way, too. There is a joy, an aliveness—after all, it is the slave, Hegel wrote, who loves life—a spirit that has manifested itself throughout the course of African-American history. It is a way of working hard and taking pride in one’s work, of laughing through tears and coping with miserable circumstances. It is a way of transforming blind hatred into beautiful music, bad cuts of meat into delicious meals. It is a way of turning searing pain into quiet strength. It is what Ralph Ellison called discipline—a quality he saw as inherent in black culture and something he believed, ultimately, would prove to be the salve to heal the racial sickness that plagued the country in which he lived. Ellison’s idea of discipline, of course, has roots in W.E.B. Du Bois and his conception of the new Negro youth:We black folk may help [mankind] for we have within us as a race new stirrings; stirrings of the beginning of a new appreciation of joy, of a new desire to create, of a new will to be . . . and there has come the conviction that the youth that is here today, the Negro youth, is a different kind of youth . . . with a new realization of itself, with new determination for all mankind.
How poignantly do these words capture what was to come—the figure of Martin Luther King, the jazz of John Coltrane, the fiction of Ralph Ellison, the nonviolent Civil Rights movement of the 1960s? How ludicrous and naïve, how wildly off base, do they seem now in the age of 50 Cent? The above quote is from a 1926 speech entitled “The Criteria of Negro Art,” which Du Bois delivered in Chicago to a gathering of descendants of slaves. A deep reader of philosophy himself, he would have been aware of the Hegelian notes ringing through him. Consider what else Du Bois had to say:If you tonight suddenly should become full-fledged Americans; if your color faded, or the color line here in Chicago was miraculously forgotten; suppose, too, you became at the same time rich and powerful;—what is it that you would want? What would you immediately seek? Would you buy the most powerful of motor cars and outrace Cook County? Would you buy the most elaborate estate on the North Shore? Would you be a Rotarian or a Lion or a What-not of the very last degree? Would you wear the most striking clothes, give the richest dinners, and buy the longest press notices?
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