by Jess Row
—
This was the life I was raised to have, racially speaking, the life my parents had, post-1973, when they left Back Bay for the suburbs: the life of a Good White Person. I was meant to have a few, select, black friends—peers, confidants, individuals—a number of acquaintances, business associates, secretaries, hygienists, a few charities, to which I would give generously, as much as possible, and a broad, sympathetic, detached view of the continuing struggles of African Americans to achieve the long-delayed goals of full civic participation, low birth rates, ascension to the middle glass, hiring equity, educational parity, and so, so, so, on, on, on. I was supposed to live with the frisson of guilt that comes from owning an expensive, elaborate security system, and to mention, at parties, that rates of incarceration for black males are six times the national average. I was supposed to organize for Obama, and own at least ten separate items of Obama paraphernalia, and proudly display my Yes We Did postcard on my refrigerator for all of 2009 and 2010, and feel that slow-fading flush of warmth and exultation, as if someone had reached out and grasped my hand, and held it, a squeeze as a substitute for an embrace. This was the life, until a few weeks ago, that I thought I was having. I should have known better.
1989—a number, another summer—sound of the funky drummer!
What did I hear, that first time, when Donald Harrison’s rendition of “Lift Every Voice” ended, and “Fight the Power” roared to life, in a cacophony of scratches, samples, and found noise, before that first deep bass hit, that nearly lifted me out of my chair? Something like the screeching of brakes, something like a jet plane taking off: that’s what the Bomb Squad sounded like to a fourteen-year-old in 1989, who was used to the tinny, Casio-looped beats on Eighties rap. Even before the story began, the credits were a body blow—the sheer brightness of the colors, the insistent, defiant, angry sidewalk dancing of Rosie Perez, in a pink miniskirt and tights, in shiny boxer’s trunks, bobbing and weaving. Everything that came after was a little after the fact of that first song. Freedom of speech is freedom of death. Elvis was a hero to most. But he never meant shit to me.
I was listening. I was paying attention.
It wasn’t long after that that the few black kids at Newton South Middle started wearing T-shirts that said It’s a black thing—you wouldn’t understand. By this time I had graduated from the haze of childhood and had begun hanging out, whenever I could, in Harvard Square, and particularly at Newbury Comics, the epicenter of cool. My father was just then negotiating the terms of his new job at Black & Decker in Baltimore—he was, is, an electrical engineer, who invents power-saving devices for small appliances—and I knew my world was shifting, that Newton was already history, over, and I started turning my attention to magazines: SPIN, Rolling Stone, Alternative Press, Maximumrocknroll, Vibe, The Source. And it was in SPIN that I read an interview with Chuck D that contained the sentence white liberals aren’t our salvation, they’re the problem.
It had never occurred to me that I was someone else’s problem.
—
With Do the Right Thing came Public Enemy. After Public Enemy came N.W.A., Niggaz With Attitude. And at the same moment, the Native Tongues, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, X-Clan, Del the Funky Homosapien, The Pharcyde, Black Sheep, Arrested Development. Ice-T, Ice Cube, Onyx. In the early Nineties, hip-hop was everywhere but invisible—still controversial, still not quite accepted even as music, still hardly on the radio, and therefore an indispensable part of a teenager’s education. By the time I was sixteen I was buying bootleg tapes of every new album, $5 a pop, and I could repeat whole songs, whole sides of albums. It was the omega to punk’s alpha, the nastiness to our earnestness. Ends justifies the means, that’s the system, so I don’t celebrate no bullshit Thanksgiving. I listened to it hypnotically, miming the gestures in traffic on the way to school, spraying my imaginary MAC-10 through the windshield. We’re the number-one crew in the area, make a move for your gat and I’ll bury ya.
This shit is pathetic, my friend Ayala Kauffmann said, once, a year later, when I was giving her a ride to school. She was biracial, though it was easy to miss; with a mop of brown curls, a nose ring, and an Indian-print blouse she could have been any other Rebekah, Aviva, or Dasi. Hinjews, Mexijews, Sephardi ex-kibbutzniks—at Willow we had them all. Her father had disappeared when she was a baby, leaving nothing to her, not even his name, and her mother had remarried Ira Kauffmann, a balding, kindly Reform rabbi with fishy eyes.
I mean, she said, I get it. I get De La Soul. Everybody loves De La Soul. But this is just like looking at Hustler. It’s gross. And it’s grosser still because it’s you. Nobody meant this for you. Or if they did, it’s just a classic retread minstrel show. Look at the bad black man! You’re getting played. I can’t believe you would pay money for this shit.
I didn’t. Well, not much, anyway.
And you think that makes it okay?
Just because you’re not listening to it doesn’t mean it’s not out there, I said. Wouldn’t you rather know?
What, this is supposed to be my direct line from the ghetto?
Chuck D says hip-hop is the black world’s CNN.
You’re not the black world. You’re not black, don’t you get it? And listening to this shit doesn’t change that. It just makes you a parasite. It would be one thing if you actually knew any black people. And I don’t count.
That’s really fair. You get to be the authority, but yet you don’t count.
You don’t get to decide what’s fair, she said. Don’t you understand? She ejected the tape, before I could stop her, and flipped it into the backseat, among the Subway wrappers and 7-Eleven coffee cups, the broken microphone stand, and the guitar-string envelopes. You get to shut up, she said. That’s your special job. You get to not have rights for a change. Shut up and go away and leave black people alone, for once.
—
I didn’t listen. Or maybe, in some sense, I did.
At Willow, in place of community service, we had what we called volunteer jobs, assigned by the principal’s office, six hours a week minimum. And the black people I knew in any true sense—any real recognition, any actual conversation—were all from my VJ shifts downtown: soup kitchen, sophomore year; food pantry, junior year; community health clinic, senior year. Mostly my supervisors were solemn, tight-mouthed men, ex-cons, Vietnam vets, halfway-house residents, who hardly bothered to learn my name; but there were always others, who asked why I wore my hair that way, who wanted to know how many hours of community service I’d been sentenced to, and what I’d done to deserve it; who offered me menthol cigarettes, which I graciously, nauseously accepted, who told me something about doing a month in the hole at Lorton, or being shot out of a helicopter in Khe Sanh.
And then there was James, a category of his own. James supervised a whole crew of prep school do-gooders—PSDGs, that was his term—at the Belinda Matthews Memorial Food Pantry on Saturday mornings, teaching us how to process a hundred pounds of cast-off lettuce, how to stack boxes of government cheese, how to load a shopping bag so it wouldn’t split. He stood a head taller than most of us, six-five, in an army jacket, with a shining bald dome, a crocheted skullcap, and a silvery soul patch, like an aging hero from a Melvin Van Peebles movie. He told us he’d been in the same City College class with Kurt Schmoke, then the mayor; after that, he’d turned down a scholarship to Howard, traveled the country playing bass in an R&B band, and spent some time with the Peoples Temple in California, years before Jonestown. But I knew, even then, he said, more than once, I knew that Jim Jones was a crazy motherfucker. It was well known that he would screw anything that moved, anybody that came within ten feet. Man or woman. That was how he did it, you know. Everybody felt dirty. Everybody was compromised. Closer you get, the more compromised. So I packed my bags and got out of that scene.
And then what? Alan once asked him. We were on the same shift, in the fall of our junior year; we’d go straight from pitching rotten tomatoes to band practice. Wha
t’d you do then, after Jim Jones? How’d you get back to Baltimore?
James palmed a cantaloupe from a wax-board crate, sniffed it, like a chef looking for the peak of ripeness. Son, he said, looking straight at Alan, I did cocaine. Nothing but cocaine for fifteen years. You hear? Bought, sold, sniffed, ate, shot up, smoked, stuck it on my gums, stuck it up my ass once, I was that desperate. Took it into prison with me, took it right up to the moment I left. Fifteen years in the white mountains. Six of them in jail. Then I found God, and here we are.
I guess we should take that as a warning, Alan said.
No, James said, and he coughed, politely, to keep from laughing. I’m not here as a warning. Not to you.
He was a Muslim, though he rarely discussed it; not Nation of Islam, but NBIM, which, he told me once, stood for New Baltimore Integrated Mosque, a special congregation where Arabs and Pakistanis and black people all worshipped together. Occasionally, if I arrived early enough, I found him doing morning prayers outside in the empty lot next to the food pantry’s row house. Inshallah, he always said, when we talked about how many bags we’d distribute that day, and Alan and I started doing it, too, as a joke, first, and then without thinking. Inshallah, we could sell fifteen T-shirts. Inshallah, if you get into Wesleyan.
It happened to be in the same moment that I came to know James that I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X for the first time, and came upon the rapper Paris, who referred casually to blue-eyed devils and sons of Yacub, as if talking about his uncle Bill from Indiana. At the Black Cat bookstore on Read Street, I found copies of The Final Call and the New Afrikan Party Newsletter, and sat reading, for an entire Sunday afternoon, one column of tiny print after another, mesmerized by explanations of how the downfall of White Amerikkka could be predicted by the phases of the sun, how school health clinics and Planned Parenthood were agents of genocide, how black people could use shea butter to boost their natural immunity to AIDS.
There was something refreshing about being called a devil. This was in 1991, at the very peak of the crack wars, when Baltimore was Murder Capital for the first time; I had just gotten my license, and I drove myself, alone, or sometimes with Alan, down to the food pantry twice or three times a week, and the fact of being independent changed everything I saw, as if I had to own the city for the first time, having to find my own parking spaces in it. It wasn’t a matter of fear, though I carried Mace with me everywhere, wore my wallet and keys on a biker chain, and checked the backseat and trunk of the car religiously, as carjackers were known to put a gun to your head from behind as you drove. What astonished me was how easily I could slip past the box hedges and pin oaks of Roland Park, the Victorians and Colonials and Tudors prim and quiet, and into the derelict corridors, the bombed-out storefronts, the vacants, the dealers in puffy jackets standing sentry on every corner, the Korean liquor stores with armored grates and triple-thick glass in front of the register. This was a drive of ten minutes. It is still, come to think of it, a drive of ten minutes. This geography, I thought, was a crime. Someone had given me a postcard of Proudhon that I taped to my locker: Property is theft. How could it be anything else? How could I be anything other than a criminal, by the fact of my pimply existence?
I even started doing it with Alan. If gay people could be queers, what was the harm? What up, devil? I said to him once, within James’s earshot, and James turned around.
Did you just say what I think you said?
You’re right, Alan said. It’s not funny.
You don’t hear me calling anyone around here a nigger, do you?
You could if you wanted to.
Thanks, James said. Thanks for giving your permission.
That’s not what I meant—
Lookit here, he snapped. We got a job to do. I watched, so clearly, as all his affection for us folded up in his face like a fan. No names, no name-calling.
Well, we are, aren’t we?
Aren’t we what?
Aren’t we the devil? I mean, aren’t we the problem?
He shrugged.
Choose, he said. Be the devil if you want. What you are right now is a pain in my ass who can’t sort tomatoes worth a damn. This look ripe to you? Get back to your job, okay? Just do your job.
—
In October of the following year, our senior year, James was shot twice in the head in his apartment above the food pantry, and the building was torched; when I drove down, that same afternoon, it was still smoking, wound around with police tape, and the roof had caved in. It reminded me of photographs of the ruins of Europe in the Second World War. I recognized one of our weekly clients, Dawson, wheeling a shopping cart filled with neatly sorted bags of beer bottles and aluminum cans. Hell, he said, you didn’t know? Motherfucker was selling drugs out of there the whole time. Wednesday through Friday, when the pantry was closed. Went in there one time myself, see if I could get me some extra cans of beans. Didn’t want none of those kinds of beans, feel me? Yeah, he had a good thing going there for a while.
I don’t believe it, I said.
Then forget it, he said. Forget I said anything. Don’t matter now, do it? Still dead. Still fucked it up for the rest of us. Got to go down to Jonah House now, stand in line.
I’ll give you a ride, I said. It felt, obscurely, like being at the end of a TV movie; I was supposed to have learned something. I was supposed to be changed. Black people’s lives, I should have said, facing the camera, are no more expressive of statistics than anyone else’s. Who am I, who are you, to go looking in this horror for a pattern?
Naw, Dawson said. Can’t leave the cart.
Put it in the trunk.
Everything’s going to turn out all right, he said, pushing away from me. Trust in the Lord. You hear me?
—
When I went to college I snapped out of my love of hip-hop, as if out of a dream. Someone looked at my tape collection and laughed. Who are you supposed to be, homeboy? I dumped them all in a box and began buying CDs instead—Pavement, The Spinanes, Stereolab, Liz Phair. I grew a goatee, developed a taste for expensive coffee, read Baudrillard and John Ashbery, read Ginsberg and Williams and Pound, read Rexroth and Kerouac and D. T. Suzuki, and began getting up at seven-thirty for daily Chinese classes.
Was I fleeing from something? Was I certain why I loved this new language, with its four tones and eighty thousand characters, its unshakable alienness, its irreconcilability with any language, any world, I knew? Is that even a question? Did any of us know why, given all our advantages, our entitlements, our good study habits and chemically inflated self-esteem, we were still so prone to spastic fits of despair, why we sought out more and more exotic ways of getting high, why we wore Sanskrit rings and tribal tattoos, salon-styled dreadlocks and Japanese see-through raincoats? How could it be running away, when it was nothing more than running in place? How could it be guilt, when the air was so thick with good intentions, with accusations and counteraccusations?
All I know is this: when I came home, I never went downtown. I tore my Illmatic poster off my bedroom wall and used the back for calligraphy practice. In a fit of orderly pique, I carted off the contents of my high school bookcase—Invisible Man, Native Son, The Fire Next Time, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Soul Brother, Black Like Me, Black Ice, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings—to the Salvation Army. I waited, listening, for the thunderclap, the world splitting open under my feet, and heard only the tinkling of the Good Humor truck down the block, the moan of Mr. Takematsu’s aging lawn mower over the backyard fence. I thought of my parents’ earnest faces, of my father, clean-shaven, playing the guitar for my kindergarten class—If I had a hammer, I’d hammer out danger . . . I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land—and their sententious, balsamic-sprinkling, Chablis-swilling, late middle age, their faces puckered with concern over the prospect that I would go off to China and become a mercenary investment banker. How vicious and unfair to blame them for my lack of imagination, with the short and pathet
ic half-life of my good intentions! When all I wanted, all any of us wanted, was to go back to that childlike state, hand-holding, faces raised to the words of the beatific saint, promising us that this story, like all good stories, had an ending, that everything was going to be okay.
—
What is there in Mookie’s face, when he staggers away from the scene of Radio Raheem’s death, picks up the garbage can, and carries it, like a javelin thrower, to its launching point, to the window of Sal’s Famous? Why, that is, doesn’t he have any expression at all? As if he’s watching his life flash by on TV. As if he’s watching an old, old movie. His whole body sags with the effort of acting out the script. And I, even then, even at fourteen, knew that I was supposed to hate him, and couldn’t. And wanted to be him, and couldn’t. Here we go again, his face says. I don’t want you to witness this. He is alone. He doesn’t want to be the Representative Black Man. But he can’t be anything else. The credits roll, I wipe my popcorn-greasy hands on my shorts. I walk out of the theater in a daze. I’ve glimpsed something. But a glimpse, as it turns out, is not enough.