by Kiese Laymon
Most of us all remember where we ran, or where we wanted to run, after we watched Michael turn around with those dirty yolk-yellow eyes, grinning like he’d escaped the whupping of a lifetime, at the end of the “Thriller” video. We don’t just remember his many moonwalks; we remember “Motown 25,” the way his work brought us out of our seats and made us wonder if we were watching some Spielberg special effect. We worried and dropped our cool when we heard Michael had burned his curl while shooting that Pepsi commercial, but even then we never ever thought he could die, not before us.
As we’ve grown into our late twenties, thirties, and forties, we’ve become more capable of looking and listening horizontally at Michael Jackson, the way our parents always have. In a nasty twist of fate, we’ve been forced to reckon with our greatest American worker being a paroled American black boy genius from Gary, Indiana, who performed in white face while begging us to “shum on.” Michael Jackson, like us, didn’t really know what to do with the eyes of white folks. He seemed to believe that one could find asylum from the aesthetic burdens of blackness in the creation of ultra-black music and a parodying of white skin and features. We wanted to tell him, “We get it, but you ain’t gotta hide no more. Not you! Magic can just be magic.”
And in our own way, we told him exactly that. And we did reckon. We knew, and know intimately, that there are more ways to perform in white face than to bleach your skin, slice off your nose, and fry your hair. Fifty years ago, James Baldwin wrote that it is only in “his” music that the American Negro is able to tell “his” story. Baldwin, as boldly imaginative as he was (even though he wrote about Michael in a paragraph for a piece called “Freaks and Ideal of American Manhood”), could not forecast what Michael Jackson’s work would do to the way we heard and saw our American character in our American stories. Michael worked to entertain us and, at the end, like most dutiful workers, he seemed to believe that even if your boss is a deceptive vulture, the customer is always right.
Like a lot of you, I’ll spend what would have been Michael’s fifty-fifth birthday waddling in the regrettable American mess Michael Jackson left and wondering if we failed to let him know how thankful we were for his work. I cry not when I think about his dead whitened body, his growing children, or the really predictable way his family has carried on in his death. I cry when I see my grandma watching Aunt Sue, Aunt Linda, and Mama huddled around the new record player in their tiny living room in Forest, Mississippi. It’s 1969, and Grandma is behind the door swelling with pride as all three of her children listen to that last note of “Who’s Loving You” spin safely away into a series of grainy hiccups. Neither Grandma, Aunt Linda, Aunt Sue, or Mama can imagine a day forty-four years in the future when their grandson, nephew, and son will tell whoever is listening that the greatest American worker of our time, a curious little paroled black boy from Gary who felt compelled to work in white face while changing the way music sounds and looks, would have been fifty-five today, but he is dead.
Michael, you were so fucked up, and so are we. We see you, really. And we love what we see. We know you were tired, and now maybe you can take care of yourself. Please don’t worry, though. Your work ain’t going nowhere. Get your rest, brother. Your work is here.
II.
Not so deep down, we all know that safety is an illusion, that only character melds us together. That’s why most of us do everything we can (healthy and unhealthy) to ward off that real feeling of standing alone so close to the edge of the world. Bernard Jeffrey McCullough was happy to be there with us.
Bernie Mac knew that vulnerability was our kryptonite and kryptonite our only chance at a compassionate life. He became a comedian at five years old. In 1963, Mac walked into a room where his mother was weeping and asked her why she was crying. Minutes later, Bill Cosby was introduced on The Ed Sullivan Show. As his mother’s tears turned into laughs, Mac promised his mother that night that he would become a comedian.
Long before Bernie Mac’s network show, he had the ability to look like he was never supposed to be on stage. He was the most wonderfully regular, perpetually forty-three-year-old looking black man you have ever seen in your life. Mac looked forty-three at thirty-two, forty-three at forty-three, and forty-three at fifty. And something about that eased our suffering and reconnected us, to home, to our uncles. He didn’t seem desperate to be funnier, sexier, skinnier, tougher, richer, whiter, or blacker. Whether we watched him on stage, television, or the big screen, a huge part of us always believed that he was too wonderfully black and home for mainstream appeal. The racially myopic parts of us couldn’t understand how white folks, Asian Americans, and Latinos could feel Bernie Mac. It wasn’t at all that we thought Mac and home were too small to shine in that arena. Mac, who really was the best of home, simply seemed too textured, sincere, ironic, and, really, too much like our uncle to be fully accepted and celebrated by anyone but us.
A significant amount of the work of all performers is done before they open their mouths. In Mac’s roaming eyes, his long elegance, his toothy scowl that looked like a smile and his toothy smile that looked like a scowl, we felt the one uncle at the family reunion who fabricates the best stories, mixed with the sole uncle who refuses to eyeball-fuck the sexy young “second” niece that all the other uncles are trying to convince themselves isn’t really related by blood. Long before he opened his mouth on stage, television, or the big screen, that was Bernie Mac to us.
Mac lacked the all-out freakish comic ability of Eddie Murphy and the agitating political savvy of Chappelle. He came into our world via Def Comedy Jam, not as the heir apparent like Martin Lawrence, Joe Torry, or Jamie Foxx. Like Pryor, and the lesser-known Robin Harris, Bernie Mac seemed happy to share the experience of suffering on the edge of the world with us.
For younger black boys in the late 80s, Robin Harris was familiar enough to be that super uncle we all had. He was black, irreverent, big-eyed, stout, caring, reckless, and, most important to his comedy, he had that just happy-to-be-alive glow. Like Mac, Harris probably came out of his mother’s womb looking twenty-five years old. By thirty, he looked forty-five. And by thirty-six, Robin Harris was dead.
Like Mac, Harris’s most famous bit involved caring for bad-ass kids. In Harris’s bit, he takes his girlfriend and her son, along with his girlfriend’s friend, BeBe, and her four bad-ass kids to Disneyland. Of course, BeBe’s kids have never been anywhere, so they tear Disneyland to pieces. BeBe’s kids jump Mickey Mouse, cut off Donald Duck’s feet, and chase Blood and Crips alike out of the park. And on the “It’s a Small World” ride, Harris would say that the children, led by the three-year-old who “can talk and shit in his Pampers at the same time,” jump out of the boat and start grabbing their dicks and strutting through the water, growling, “Smawl Wuhl! Smawl Wuhl! We…BeBe’s kids. We don’t die. We…multiply.”
Bernie Mac also wanted to explore familial desperation and loss of innocence, not in the hope of reinforcing safety or taking anyone away from the edge, but in order to bring himself to the edge with us. Mac’s fifteen-minute performance in The Original Kings of Comedy takes us from his inability to take care of his crack-addicted sister’s children, to a nephew who makes fun of his mentally challenged bus driver, to the varied black uses of the word “motherfucker.” Though Mac’s performance, like Harris’s BeBe skit, relies on a slanted critique of single mothering, the performance is technically still the best comedic stage performance I’ve seen in my lifetime.
Though few will admit it, black comedy and black comedians laid the groundwork for what would become the contemporary hip-hop emcee. Successful emcees are able to boast, confess, and critique just as efficiently as our most accomplished black comedians. The mic is their heartbeat and, like Rakim, many successful comedians are known for literally slamming the mic down when the show is over “to make sure it’s broke.”
Bernie Mac broke many mics and solidified himself as our very last “we” comedian. And as quiet as it’s kept, we’ve only had t
hree successful “we” comedians in the last thirty years: Richard Pryor, Robin Harris, and Bernie Mac. All three of these comedians seemed joyful in being there with us (which is different than being there in front of us), and though each had his own kind of cool, if at any point a heckler had interrupted his show with “Damn, Bernie (or Richard or Robin), that’s some sad-ass shit you talking about,” all three would have replied, “You gotdamn right,” with a pointed frown on his face, “cuz I’m a sad motherfucker, you black summamabitch…” And everyone in the joint, including the heckler, would have known that Bernie was saying, “I love you, too.”
In 2001, Mac was the only King of Comedy without a television show. By 2002, Mac had parlayed that great fifteen minutes into his own show on Fox. “Had I gone to another major network,” he said, “I would have had to battle with them every day to get my point of view across. And I didn’t feel like battling about my culture.”
His culture. Our home.
Mac was reluctant to go the route of TV because he saw how it managed to water down and make caricatures of comedians like Don Rickles and Richard Pryor. Uncompromising, blue-black, bug-eyed uncles with deep Chicago twangs and a deeper love for black folks don’t get networks shows, much less single-camera network shows with no laugh tracks. Bernie Mac’s show was as meta as it was soulful and resilient.
Anticipating the question of how black comedians keep the edge and contour of their stand-up on network television, Bernie Mac starred as “Bernie Mac” on The Bernie Mac Show. And he had to. Can you imagine Mac trying to cram all of the jagged wonder he embodied on stage into some cardboard comic caricature?
Bernie Mac’s TV show explored family values without prescribing family values. Like George Burns and Dobie Gillis before him, Mac’s use of the confessional address to the audience within the show brought America into his house without any unexplained synthesizing of his voice. And when that voice was synthesized, “America” and Mac knew it, and we were left to critique America’s consumption and/or misunderstanding of the synthetic Bernie Mac, just as we were able to critique Mac’s troubled character. The show forced us to look at race, think about class, and feel gender through the lens of postmodernity, new black celebrity, new black money, new black parenting, and old-school black communal values. The show gave us a rare model of how these intersections can be navigated while producing meaningful, cutting-edge provocative art.
Around the third season of the show, we could tell something wasn’t right with Bernie. His eyes didn’t look right. His hair looked like it was just haphazardly placed on the top of his head. And though he still had killer comic timing, the reverberation was much less frantic and exciting. Mac still felt like our uncle, but our uncle had gotten sick. And on August 9, 2008, Uncle Bernie Mac died from complications of pneumonia.
Before he died, Bernie Mac modeled honesty. And really, that should be one of the goals of any artist. Mac stood there with us on the edge of the world suffering from physical, emotional, familial, and psychic afflictions. He showed us that we suffered together, and though we didn’t have the will or the platform to say it that he had, he heard us and replied, “I love you, too.”
Bernie Mac was the blackest, baddest, most loving genius uncle summamabitch to walk across this country’s stage. And no matter how big he got, he always looked happy to be here with us. We loved you, Bernie Mac, for all of this and a whole lot more. You reminded us that we were never alone, and that we owed each other honest, joyful explorations of our past and present pain.
Bernie Mac once said, “A lot of my material, it comes from my pain, the loss of my parents, my family. I try to find humor in the most inopportune times. That’s what keeps us alive, keeps us decent people, keeps us connected no matter what. That’s comedy, man. That’s comedy.”
Thank you for your character, Bernard McCullough. Thank you for your pain.
III.
Prior to September 13, 1996, neither I nor anyone I knew in Jackson, Mississippi, looked up to Tupac Amaru Shakur. We heard Tupac’s debut verse on Digital Underground’s “Same Song” at Lerthon’s house and thought he rhymed like a kid who wanted to be down. We eventually watched Tupac in Juice on Stacey’s VCR and thought he was a watered-down O-Dog from Menace. We listened to Tupac’s stacked vocals and were convinced he lacked the vocal gravity and lyrical imagination of Chuck D and KRS-One, or the mesmerizing psychological affliction of Scarface and Ice Cube.
While we literally thought we could rhyme at least as well as a twenty-one-year-old Tupac Shakur, when the music stopped, he refused to hit us upside the head with clumsy clichés and twinkly phraseology. He told the truth, without rhyme, unlike anyone we’d ever heard. During Tupac’s first interview for MTV, Kurt Loder lobbed the trite question, “Can you tell me some of the things that someone like you who grows up in the inner city deals with?”
Tupac told him, “Our family crest was cotton. The only thing we can leave behind is culture, is music. Dignity and determination, that’s what we have. I feel like I’m cheated! Instead of me fulfilling my prophecy, I have to start one. Instead of me doing a good job of carrying on an empire, I have to build one. That’s a hell of a job for a twenty-one-year-old. That’s a hell of a job for any youngster, male or female, to have to build an empire for your family…”
By 1994, at age twenty-three, Tupac was the reckless outlaw of his, and other’s, lyrical compositions. Like too many of us, he flirted recklessly with bullets, police, money, curious women, and mean men. While the media focused on his first shooting in New York City and the eleven months he served in a correctional facility for sexually abusing a nineteen-year-old woman, something else was happening. The precision and believability of his art finally caught up with the breadth of his social vision.
Somehow, Tupac’s voice, which had once seemed almost brittle to us, became an inflected instrument, one that could whisper, chant, and bellow at any point in a song. His majestic manipulation of the long “e” in words like “adversary,” “crazy,” “cemetery,” “memories,” “bury,” “Hennessy,” “misery,” “bleed,” “please,” “free,” “g’s,” “me,” and of course “enemies” made millions of people believe not only in Tupac, but in his version of their truth.
Then he got shot on November 7, 1996.
I was twenty-one, four years younger than Tupac. Bullets and love had run me away from Mississippi one year earlier and I had landed in a progressive place out in the middle of some Ohio cornfields. Oberlin College was peopled with what my grandma called “good white folks.” One of these good white folks, a short wobbly drunk whose name I can’t remember, tapped me on my shoulder as I was coming out of the shower late one Saturday night. He told me that Tupac had been shot again in Las Vegas.
“MTV told me,” he said. “It’s true.”
Without knowing how many times he’d been shot, where the bullets landed, how, or if, he made it to the hospital alive, even if Tupac Shakur had actually been shot, I knew he was going to die.
I didn’t know much in the fall of 1996, but I knew intimately the ways that black American ambition, unchecked by healthy doses of fear, would lead to slow, painful death. This was our American story. I also knew that when enough rusty bullets were fired from traumatized citizens at moving black targets (no matter how passionate, willful, sensual, and imaginative those targets might be), the targets would eventually cease to exist.
It was inevitable.
As a grown man who now makes a living teaching and tapping on the worn screen doors of American memory and imagination, I still can’t find space for a Tupac Shakur in his forties. I’d like to believe that Tupac would have gotten even better as an artist, activist, and critical citizen. But I can’t figure out how someone so brilliant, so committed to honest exploration, so willing to fight for us, with us, and against us, could ever live beyond twenty-five in our United States.
Sixteen years after Tupac’s death, I need help imagining how a twenty-five-year-old Tupac might have engag
ed with the world the day after September 11, 2001. What would that twenty-five-year-old Tupac have done after his people were left drowning in poisonous water on August 29, 2005? What would he say to the relentless American politicians on the left and right who take no responsibility for their part in our American mess? How would he touch the millions of brothers and sisters in prison-industrial complexes and the thousands of young brothers taking turns dying and killing in Chicago, Jackson, Oakland, Little Rock, New Orleans, Newark, Detroit, Gary, Poughkeepsie, and Flint?
Eerily, the 2012 Republican and Democratic national conventions ended without one mention of these American citizens or the responsibility this nation has to them. Not only would the convention speakers not talk to them; they refused to even talk about them. While many of us were beaming with joy at the speeches we heard from Michelle, Bill, and Barack, and thanking our lucky stars that Mitt Romney and his band of Unimaginative American Thieves were… well, obviously unimaginative American thieves, a part of me was remembering the political stars of our nation, on both the right and left, when they were twenty-five.
Bill Clinton was milling around the halls of Yale Law School hitting on a fellow student named Hillary Rodham. Barack Obama was trying his hand at community organizing in Chicago. Michelle Robinson had just finished her first year as an associate at Sidley & Austin, a corporate law firm in Chicago. Mitt Romney was finishing up his senior year as an English major at BYU.