by Kiese Laymon
This is American law. In Hershey. In Jackson. In Compton. In Oakland. In Brooklyn.
This is American life.
I’m wondering what will happen if I ask the cops, “Do y’all still drink Kool-Aid? Does it make your tongue purple? Remember Tang? Would you ever want us to do this to you and your kids? I’m serious. Don’t you think police, teachers, doctors, and dentists should be more just and compassionate than the rest of us? Who protects us from you?”
I’m wondering if Nicole, who is now standing at the back of her green Geo Metro talking to one of the cops, will think I could have actually thrown drugs out of her passenger-side window. This, I tell myself, is why Mama and Grandma got so mad when Nicole’s white stepfather disowned her for talking to me. Grandma and Mama believed that if anyone should have used disowning as a tactic to protect their child, it should have been them. But they never did. They never would. They simply said, “Don’t get caught riding in the car with white girls” in the same speech during which they told me, “Don’t fuck anyone you can’t imagine raising a child with.”
I’m wondering if Nicole is wondering if she ever really knew me. I’m thinking I should have asked myself that question long before we decided to move in together. I feel so typical.
From the backseat of the police car, I’m watching this blinking blue field where my kind has thrown lots of invisible, and not so invisible, rocks of crack cocaine. I convince myself that Mississippi is on the other side of that field.
I want to run home.
For a second, though—truth be told—I’m wondering if I actually did throw rocks out of the window. Sitting in the back of that police car in handcuffs that had been wrapped around the wrists of many of my kind, I’m wondering if there’s any chance that I am what, not who, they think I am.
I’m watching the police search Nicole’s car. They pull out my backpack from the trunk. The older cop reaches in the bag and pulls out what looks like some condoms they gave out at Lilith Fair. He holds the backpack up in Nicole’s face and shakes his head. He comes to the back of the police car I’m sitting in and tells me to get out.
“Thought you said we wouldn’t find anything in your bag,” he says.
I get it. This isn’t just about race or love; it’s mostly about fucking.
As calm as I can, still water cradling my eyes, I say, “You should find that crack you saw me throw or you should let me go.” The cop makes some comment about my mouth and takes the handcuffs off.
I don’t feel free. I want to run home.
“All the people that you could’ve stopped, and you chose us?” I say with my hands pressed against my thighs. Cars filled with white folks keep passing us. They’re all watching, mostly knowing what my kind is capable of. I wonder if Kurt is in one of those cars. I wonder, too, how many of my kind saw me handcuffed on the side of the road that night.
They want to help, I tell myself. But they already know.
“You’uns safe tonight,” the older officer says. “We’re just doing our job.”
They still got us, I tell myself. They still got us.
“That was so ridiculous,” Nicole’s friend keeps saying from the backseat as we head home. “That was so totally ridiculous.”
No one else is saying a word. Nicole is driving eight miles per hour below the speed limit.
As we get closer to Emmaus, Nicole’s friend starts replaying what happened from the beginning of the concert to the cops saying I threw crack out the window.
She nervously says “totally” and “ridiculous” a few more times. She never says “afraid,” “angry,” “worried,” “complicit,” “tired,” or “ashamed.”
We got out of the Geo and saw the blue flickering of the TV on the upstairs balcony of Kurt’s apartment. Kurt and his family were watching something with a loud laugh track. Our sliding glass door was covered in new muddy smudges.
I walked into the smaller bedroom of our apartment. While Nicole’s friend kept replaying what happened for the third time in the living room, I dug my feet into the carpet of the bedroom and tried to push myself through the wall.
Nicole knocked on the door.
“You OK?” she asked me.
“I’m good,” I said. “For real. You should spend some time with your friends before they leave.”
Nicole looked at me like she wanted to say everything was going to be okay. I wanted her to say that we were the collateral damage of a nation going through growing pains. Part of me wanted us to hug and agree each other to death that we were better people than we actually were. But most of me was tired of lying to myself and really tired of talking to white folks.
Nicole kept staring at me through the silence when we heard some thumping and screaming upstairs. I told her that I was sorry for being a dick, but I just wanted to read and write before going to bed.
I grabbed my notebook and told myself I was going to use that day as fuel to finish a chapter I was writing about four kids from Mississippi who time-travel through a hole in the ground. The kids think time-travel is the only way to make their state and their nation love itself and the kids coming after them. I scribbled away at a chapter before getting stuck on these two sentences one of the characters sees written in sawdust in a workshed around 1964:
We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.
We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.
We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.
We are real black characters…
After what happened that day, all that really mattered was making it to those two clunky sentences. Everything else, including Kurt’s intentions, Nicole’s nervous friend, and my shame at getting niggered by two perverted police officers, was as light as the paper airplanes I threw past Kurt’s apartment. And making it to that point, as quiet as it’s kept, felt like the most that one of my kind could ask for, especially a few minutes from some invisible crack, not that many miles from Mississippi, and directly beneath the apartment of an American white boy who needed to say “youse” and “your kind” way more than some of y’all could ever imagine.
Hip-Hop Stole My Southern Black Boy
IN 1998, I STOOD IN THE BASEMENT BATHROOM OF Mudd Library at Oberlin College and asked myself, Quick, Kie, what in the hell is a cipher? It was a question I couldn’t ask out loud, as I was speaking of the word, not Tha Cypher, a magazine that Rich Santiago, from the Bronx, and David Jacobs were creating outside the bathroom. The word “cipher,” I remembered had initially crept up on me in a much smaller Central Mississippi bathroom back in 1992.
Back then, fifteen minutes into our lunch period, seven of us descended into what we called the B-Boy bathroom. B-Boy for us meant neither Breaker Boy, Bad Boy, nor Bronx Boy; it meant Black Boy. There, B. Dazzle, who was the little brother of god-emcee Kamikaze of the group Crooked Lettaz, chaired a lyrical demolition of Stacy “King Slender” Hill.
I slouched between two urinals, hands cupped over mouth, providing a weak beat box while B. Dazzle went on and on and on… Every Black Boy in the bathroom caught a vibe from his lyrics, or at least we acted like he did, in spite of the fact that we were the Southern Niggas who needed to get wiser, and because we were the Southern Niggas who ironically felt wiser and more real just by listening to B. Dazzle. The seven of us, including the just-dissed King Slender, bobbed our heads and pumped our fists like we knew what everything in his rhyme, including his “cipher,” really meant.
You had to be a B-Boy to enter our space. No black girls, Asians, or white folks stepped foot in the B-Boy bathroom when we rocked it. In my imagination, I always see K. Parry, a gregarious, theatrical, give-peace-a-chance white guy trying to Rocky his way into our space with some sharp wit and dramatic vocal bombast. This large thespian wobbles into the
bathroom in some stone-washed cutoffs and penny loafers. He proceeds to spit a monologue that doesn’t even rhyme before getting sliced up by the previously demolished King Slender, who says something like, “…I’m Clubber Lang, K. Parry, not Stacy the Hill/This the Nigga version of Rocky and Balboa gettin’ killed.” King Slender ends it by saying, “Live on, Apollo Creed.”
Classic.
Black girls couldn’t be a real part of our space because they were busy with their own rituals. Plus, getting caught in the opposite sex’s bathroom got you suspended for a week. We cracked open the door of the bathroom just enough so the black girls could hear. And what they heard, probably more than our actual rhymes, were our responses to our rhymes. As the beat box–accompanied boasts, confessionals, and critiques moved from between urinals and stalls out the door of the bathroom into the hallway, the black girls, white folks, Asians, and wack niggas could only consume and interrogate the sound, not the creative culture or experience from whence that sound sprang. Our cipher was off limits to them, B. Dazzle told me. And quiet as it was kept, we wanted it that way. We wanted the black girls, especially, to need to hear what we were up to from a distance, but we refused to conceive them as our primary audience. Conversely, they kept us out of their private rituals, too.
From our position, the black girls in the hall were positioned in the same way we were positioned as Southern eavesdroppers of New York hip-hop. Some would get close as they could to the crack of the door, but they could never come all the way in. We understood that the seven Southern Black Boys in that space were private, mysterious, and desired by folk who didn’t really know how or why we did what we did. That belief made us feel more powerful, possessed, closer to real hip-hop and strangely closer to New York.
Within that B-Boy room, all of us knew that hip-hop credibility had little to do with the quality of your boast, the intensity of your critique, or the passion of your confessional. Really, it was all rooted in your hip-hop aesthetic. And that aesthetic seemed to be rooted in geography. Hip-hop and New York became unspoken adjectives in small Southern spaces like this, and one’s worth in the B-Boy room was based almost solely on how hip-hop or New York the other six listeners thought you and your style were.
I had a decent bit of hip-hop credibility due to spending summers in upstate New York visiting my father (to most black Mississippians, New York state meant New York City), but my rhyme style was too deliberate, dirty, local, filled with too many “or” words that were pronounced with a long “o” to be considered authentic New York. “Now I need no mic,” I would rap, “just a slow-ass tempo/step to me wrong and motherfucker, you in fo’/a beat down that’ll go down in your history books/come try and fuck with Kie, get yo ego took.” That was the favorite of my four lyrical styles. And the other three styles, though dope in their own way, sounded remarkably close to that one. In the B-Boy bathroom, my rhymes swayed the crowd, but the movement started and stopped in between those two Central Mississippi urinals. B. Dazzle, on the other hand, moved the crowd to different states, figuratively and literally, and his character was as desired and enigmatic as his rhymes.
I believed the myth was that B. Dazzle and his older brother, Kamikaze, spent summers not in Poughkeepsie, Rochester, Albany, or Syracuse, but at some cousin’s place in the South Bronx. The myth allowed me to slavishly follow when B. Dazzle chided us to use the term “hip-hop” instead of “rap,” and “cipher” instead of “rap circle.” “Hip-hop is more lyrical, more New York, nigga,” he told me. He said it was universal, real, filled with brothers in ciphers dropping knowledge, breaking, deejaying, graffiti writing, showing, and proving, while rap music, on the ashy black-hand side, was artistically inferior, country-sounding, and local.
Henry James didn’t have to tell us that geography was fate. Shit, we knew that. The seven of us had similar dreams of being divine emcees, too, though we knew geography wouldn’t allow it. Plus, our mamas and grandparents had other plans, and they made sure we became multiple dreamers who actualized boring dreams like becoming managers, counterfeiters, computer engineers, racketeers, sergeants, pimps, and college professors.
As much as parts of us tried not to be, we were country Black Boys with little to no experience with real New York hip-hop except Yo! MTV Raps and Rap City, or when the Fresh Fest came to the Coliseum or KRS-ONE came to Jackson State University. And by Mississippi standards, the seven of us weren’t even that country because we were from the city of Jackson. In Jackson, and other parts of the Black Belt, we were no longer the dutiful disciples of the Holy Trinity of MCs—Kane, KRS, and Rakim. We respected the gods, but we were done exclusively eavesdropping on the rhymes coming out of New York City. West Coast music, as varied as it was, met us where we were and, truth be told, it was music we could see and hear. We also accepted that the West Coast and the Black Belt were family, and had been since the second great migration of the 1940s ushered thousands of southern black families to Los Angeles for jobs in the automotive and defense industries.
It’s true that the South, dismissed as culturally slow, meaningless, and less hip (hop) than New York, had yet to, as Albert Murray wrote, lyrically stylize our Southern worlds into significance. But if outsiders really listened to the musty movement behind the Geto Boyz, UGK, Eight Ball, and MJG, they would have heard the din of deeply Southern Black Boys and girls eager to keep it real local. We wanted to use hip-hop’s brash boast, confessional, and critique to unapologetically order the chaos of our country lives through country lenses, with little regard for whether it sounded like real hip-hop.
We were on our way to realizing that we were blues people, familiar in some way or another with dirt. There were no skyscrapers and orange-brown projects stopping us from looking up and out. We didn’t know what it was like to move in hordes, with enclosed subway trains slithering beneath our feet.
And we liked it that way.
En route to lyrical acceptance of our dirty, we met Scarface, JT Money, Ice Cube, Bun B, MC Ren, and D.O.C. And after a while, we realized that they were our cousins, our uncles, our best friends, us. We rode through Compton, Oakland, Port Arthur, and Houston the same way we rode through Jackson, Meridian, Little Rock, New Orleans, and Birmingham. We rode in long cars with windows down, bass quaking, and air fresheners sparkling like Christmas tree ornaments.
We felt pride in knowing that the greatest producer alive was an uncle from Compton and the most anticipated emcee in the history of hip-hop was a lanky brother from Long Beach. We knew, no matter what anyone in New York said, that the baddest emcee on earth, song for song, album for album, was an aging cousin from South Central Los Angeles whose government name was O’Shea.
But B. Dazzle, through his lyrics, clothes, sensibility, and utterances of “ciphers” still reveled in being New York hip-hop. And being New York hip-hop trumped being a Southern Black Boy who wondered if New York hip-hop loved him in the early 1990s. Chicago rapper Common Sense rapped in 1994 about faithfully loving HER, a version (or virgin) of pure hip-hop who moved away from New York essence and lost her soul. We could and couldn’t relate, because while the last thing on earth we admitted to wanting to be was a woman or a gay man, our love interest, nonetheless was a HE, a him. And though HE was changing, HE was still sadly New York hip-hop. Around our way, his holy local apostle was a gap-toothed brother with skills and chappy lips named B. Dazzle. The booming acoustics of the B-Boy bathroom and the B-Boy imagination were his Mecca, and since this was before the advent of player-hation, I couldn’t hate. All I could do was not let on that I was starting to love a kind of hip-hop that loved me back, and try hard as hell to be down.
That was then.
Rewind (or fast-forward) back to my standing in an Oberlin College bathroom in early 1998. While Rich Santiago and D. Jakes were in the A-level of the library trying to find titles for their new hip-hop magazine, Rich looked at me and said, “Yo Kie, what about Tha Cypher.” And I was on some, “Yeah man. That’s it.” Now, exactly why I thought Tha Cypher wa
s it is where the story gets a bit shameful. At the time, when I heard “cipher,” I didn’t think of a tight circle of brothers taking turns boasting, critiquing, and confessing themselves into the world over a beat box. The word “cipher” reminded me solely of B. Dazzle and my faulty obsession. It sounded industrial, sleek, masculine, New York—like if the magazine could speak, through gapped fronts, he would say “I am hip-hop, son. Yah mean? What!”
And I guessed that’s what Rich and them wanted in a magazine. But honestly, I understood a few hours later that I might have been too country, too dirty, too much of a Black Boy—might have smelled too many boiling chitlins, said “fenda” too many times, got my ass waxed by too many switches off the chinaberry tree, had comfortably ridden in too many pineconed cabs of pickup trucks—to thoroughly understand what a cipher was in 1992 or 1998. When I said “cipher” over and over again in that bathroom, with all its jaggedly dangling connotations, it sounded fake, forced, clean. Was our Black Boy Central Mississippi space just another cipher? The more I said the word, the more I felt like Puffy’s verse in Benjamin’s, Michael Jackson’s chin, Vanilla Ice’s fade, Hype’s Belly and Soul Train post Don Cornelius. I felt like a something, not a somebody, with forced style and suspect substance, a something that would go to all lengths to never acknowledge its dirtiness, a something that created pleasure in aesthetically being the opposite of a Mississippi Black Boy.
Don’t get me wrong! In college, like lots of Southern Black Boys, I could bring the ever fake and flexible “Word,” “Nam sayin’?” or “Yo, son” where need be. But stripped of the verbal signifiers of hip-hop, I was left kinda naked. I became what I was running from in that Mississippi B-Boy bathroom in 1992, the opposite of NYC B-Boy. I was an unrefined, red-eyed, dirty, Mississippi Black Boy looking for both acceptance and something to resist anywhere I could find it. In 1992, it was B. Dazzle and in 1998, at Oberlin, it was Tha Cypher. Both times, the “it” I really wanted to accept, resist, and love was New York hip-hop. But to love and resist New York hip-hop, I had to believe hip-hop and New York were ends in themselves that had little to do with black Southern me.