A thousand I’m Listening letters, e-mails, phone calls, sixty for every Nigger Lover Die, whiteboys and whitegirls sneaking arsonist looks all around them, this is wrong, just wrong, my parents friends life wrong, many interested, cautious, curious, sad, pissed off, skeptical black folks wondering, glancing up and down the fresh-pressed length of this potential/disaster, mufucker apologize to me I’ll wring his neck—Please, fool, you’ll take whatever these white folks dish out like always—finally some progress—in the news today the news today the news today:::colossal joke? inside the mind of Dominique Lavar, Macon Detornay’s spokesman and some say the spinmaster behind the the thethethe—tired feeling always behind Macon’s eyes, even five minutes post–morning piss, everybody always crashing to sleep instead of drifting, passing out with their shoes on in sudden narcoleptic snatches. One time Andre started snoring with a half-eaten pizza slice in his hand, conked out for three hours like that. Fleet Walker’s book seemed glued to Macon’s hand at all times now; he read and reread and sometimes insisted on speaking whole sections aloud to Andre, who quietly despised listening but had started picking up the book himself when Macon put it down. Sometimes one or the other of them would devolve mid-convo into grunts of agreement, and then the other, or Nique, or Logan, would notice that the book was open:
We mulattos have felt the push and pull of white and blackness like perhaps no other race—if a race is in fact what we are. Throughout my life, I have glimpsed opportunity and oppression as though I had two sets of eyes, or as though I were in the practice of opening first my left and then my right and then my left, watching the world bounce back and forth between the two perspectives, never quite synthesizing or settling: African, American, African, American. The insertion of a hyphen between the two, as favored by some of the newer Negro leaders, serves only to render a fellow cross-eyed.
A general fallacy among white Americans is the tendency to assumemulattos to be the result of miscegenation. The truth is that many families, including my own, have been that way for generations:half-and-halfs marry half-and-halfs and thus a caste is born. But the belief is at the crux of the dilemma we mulattos face. We are walking proof of something white and black people alike would rather pretend does not occur, proof of either violence or intimacy between the races. Our existence is the punch line to a dirty joke.
Many whites likewise indulge in a belief that the only education afforded blacks during Reconstruction was to be had in one-room schoolhouses—just as they think that in slave times the only way we learned to read was if Miss Anne took a liking to a lucky young house nigger and taught him at her knee. That, too, is hogwash. There were more black senators and congressmen during Reconstructionthan there are today. More black businesses, too, and better ones. My father, a freeman born in Ohio, was a doctor throughout my youth. My brother Weldy became one in his later years as well. He went to school and earned a degree in homeopathy,in point of fact.
I myself graduated from Oberlin College, the first integrated institution of higher learning in the nation, almost fifty years ago now, as a member of the Class of 1882. Passed up law school to play baseball. Or, as my father was fond of saying, “chose a boy’s folly over a man’s life.” He still came to cheer me on, though.
I wish I could recall more of what went through my mind when I was in the public eye, what I did with all the rage my dignity and refinement forced back deep inside me—so deep that it began to corrode, disintegrate me a little at a time. By the end of my playing days, I hated myself and the two races swimming together in my bloodstream. I longed to slice open my veins and watch the double fountain spray from my upturned wrist, white blood spurting right and black blood geysering left toward Africa, their years of fightinginside me finally done.
How do you react when you pick up the newspaper after game day—year in and year out, mind you—and read, “The brunette catcher Walker carried himself like a perfect gentleman,” when some reporter’s attempt at liberalism is to dutifully report the startling news that the nigger didn’t rip anyone’s arms off today, didn’t revert to his savage ancestral ways and eat the umpire or beat on homeplate with his mighty member while chanting voodoocurses—but there’s always tomorrow? Are you grateful when they compliment your comportment, laud your game-winning hit, or is every word another brushstroke in the coon painting, evidenceeither for the prosecution or the defense, and it doesn’t matterwhich because what’s on trial is your humanity and that’s bad enough?
Perhaps it was too much for me to handle. I’ve got a few firsts to my name besides first black major leaguer that might lead you to think so. First nigger in Ohio to kill a white man and go free— the victim an Irish laborer who assaulted me on my way home from a tavern two years after the end of my playing days and soon discovered that I was not so foolish as to walk through this white world without a knife. I pled self-defense and righteously so, althoughmy own celebrity and the team of white Oberlin law professorswho assembled to take up their old student’s cause was what truly carried the day.
First black man—among the first, leastways—to grow so sick and frustrated with this country and the hopelessness of being black and being white and being black and white that, when I was fifty years of age—the first thirty-five of them spent integrating what is now known as the Great American Pastime, and which has now long been entirely segregated—I said to hell with this damn nation, with its absurd notions of living side by side, former slave and former master, hate glinting back and forth across the rhododendronbushes. Let’s evacuate the Negroes en masse, by force if necessary, and return to Africa.
I wrote a tract to that effect, entitled “Our Home Colony,” which remains quietly on file at the Library of Congress, and almost nowhere else—its general failure to galvanize a response a blessing in disguise, because if there was anything I hated more than white prejudice at that time, it was black people. The century had just turned, and I had been forced out of baseball and begun to drink and to despair. In myself, blacks, whites, mulattos—you name it, I’d lost faith in it. If it was inside me, I didn’t want it.
A man can only compromise for so long before he forgets he’s compromising at all, before some part of him feels he deserves the treatment he’s receiving or blames something close by for it. If black people could only act more like me, I often thought, then I would not have to suffer guilt by association. Toe the line long enough and the world beyond the line blurs. A man learns to hate above all else whatever is close enough to lash out at, becomes conditioned to attack only that for which he will be rewarded.
Self-hatred, of course, was no cause for embarrassment. Open any black magazine and you could read your fill of advertisements for skin-bleaching products guaranteed to make you white. Visit your local university and you could hear any number of black scholars and lecturers lamenting the American Negro as the lowest,basest son of Africa. I thank God that I no longer count myself among their ranks.
“It is contrary to everything in the nature of man and almost criminal to attempt to harmonize these two diverse peoples while living under the same government,” I wrote whilst in the grip of that madness. “The Negro has no ideals of his own; nor can he have. Everything that pertains to his own ethnic type he despises, and this is done in most cases unconsciously.”
The strange wisdom of these words becomes clear to me now, for even as I wrote such things—and it was mulattos for whom I saved my harshest words, writing that “It is impossible to make a hybrid race of men. What is to prevent this progeny from being worse than animal? Such creatures are more dangerous to societythan wild beasts, for these last can easily be hunted and shot, while the former go on procreating their lecherous kind withouthindrance”—I never truly included myself. I condemned the American Negro and the future of race in America with vigor and venom, called for the wholesale return of blacks to Africa and authorized the use of force if it proved necessary, but never for a moment did I intend to leave the country. Perhaps I realized, even then
, that I would only have been running from myself. I’ve dashed from clusters of reporters and mobs of white folks, raced against low throws on a line from right field to home plate and after trains gathering speed outside Atlanta, run for my life and for my livelihood,and nothing is so exhausting as trying to sprint past your shadow.
I’ve often reflected that perhaps the small taste of equality I had as a student was what made the world outside seem all the more oppressive. Never in my life have I been able to forget that I was black, but at Oberlin I came the closest. Today, the entire campus has fallen victim to de facto segregation, but during my time there I ate and studied alongside white people and felt more or less the same as everybody else—and often better, because I could hit a baseball farther.
I left school nurturing the naive notion that while I was on the baseball field all else would be forgotten. Politics and hatred might surround the idea of my participation, I told myself, but once I crossed the foul line chalked in the brilliant green grass, I would enter a sanctuary, a place of peace governed only by sportsman-ship.When I stepped up to the plate to take my three swings at immortality,the same as any player got, those crowds would be forced to see a man.
But when I joined the International League, the world reasserteditself with a vengeance, and I was once again a lonely black man playing a white game in which the rules kept changing. I learned two things my first day on the job: As long as I played I’d be risking danger and humiliation, and as long as I played I’d be guaranteed the spotlight. I didn’t realize until the following morning,when I picked up the newspaper, that as long as I played I’d also be the foil for a public discussion of race. From that day on, my name never appeared in the newspaper without some epithet before it, benign or malignant—I was the colored Walker, the coon Walker, the brunette or dusky or Spanish or mulatto or niggerWalker. A traveling symbol of blackness whose performance would, for a few hours, condemn or confirm the dogmas of white racism.
In truth, it would confirm them regardless of what I did. Should I comport myself badly, it would be taken up as proof of blacks’ inferiority, our flawed and primitive physiologies, as confirmation of the U.S. Sanitary Commission’s 1865 report stating that mulat toswere “of inferior vitality” to blacks and whites alike.
I still remember the excitement with which the Darwinists awaited the census figures of 1880; they were convinced that the black population would be shown to have dwindled because Negroescouldn’t survive freedom. Scores of fans, likewise, were certainthat I would collapse, mid-season, due to exhaustion. If I did well, on the other hand, my successes were attributed to enormous, animalistic strength; surely, my gentleman’s demeanor cloaked a jungle beast, and it was a good thing my muscles were distracted with baseball because otherwise I was certain to lunge at the nearestwhite woman.
I suppose we should be thankful that even as America pretends to advance—as it allows young men like Louis Armstrong and Booker T. Washington to flourish, men who might never have had such chances had they been born when I was—we are still providedwith regular displays of brutal, crystalline honesty. We should be glad, on some level, for the gruesome spectacle of lynchings.Whatever scant morality we retain cries for the killer to stand over his kill without averting his eyes, to glory or sorrow openly in the blood on his hands.
Alas, such images no longer hold any power over me now, in my old age. Instead, when I begin to soften toward America, when I find my sense of outrage fading, I think not of the lynch mobs I have seen, or even of the one from which I myself once managed to escape. More real to me, somehow, and more horrible, is the simplememory of the 1904 World’s Fair held in St. Louis, Missouri, which I attended with my wife and children.
Perhaps you can recall the exhibit; it has been forgotten now, but at the time it was quite famous. In St. Louis—where, incidentally,I played my first professional game, on an empty stomach becauseservice was refused me at my team’s hotel—African Pygmies were imported and displayed like animals. Dropped into so-called reproductions of their “primitive” habitats, made to sit before shacks and behind fences and stage mud fights to demonstrate what life back home on the Dark Continent was like.
In the name of science, the “savages” were used to justify the white man’s every prejudice. The fair even sponsored an AnthropologyDay, on which the “specimens” were forced to compete in wholly unknown sports. Nothing—not even an 0-for-8 double-headerfrom the brunette Walker—reinforces the doctrine of Negro athletic inferiority like the sight of a fifty-year-old sprinter hobblingaround a track, or an African “champion” who has never before thrown a shot put making comic attempts to learn the techniquebefore an audience of hooting fairgoers munching on snacks. Fairgoers both black and white, I might add.
The Pygmies were such a success at the World’s Fair that one of them, Ota Benga, went on display in the New York City Zoo when the exhibition in St. Louis closed. To no one’s great surprise, he took his own life in a matter of months. I wonder what the first visitor who passed his cage and saw the Pygmy’s lacerated body thought. Zookeeper, oh zookeeper? Is that animal supposed to be bleeding like that?
Chapter Nine
By Thursday, Macon had been cover boy fifteen times over. When they plugged it in, the phone rang off the hook: redneck death threats, thirteen-year-old punk-rock chicks asking for The Franchise’s hand in marriage, reporters and more reporters. The media had found a new darling, one to whom they had almost total access any time of day or night, and they were eager to convey Macon’s views on things he’d never even thought about. Nique and Andre had developed the habit of spewing whatever bullshit came to mind when they fielded such calls, as a way to blow off steam. So many disembodied voices clamored for answers, and dutifully scribbled down whatever they were given, that it hardly seemed to matter.
“Mr. Detornay’s views on forestry conservation? Brother Macon feels that the felling of redwoods is a metaphor for the felling of young black brothers. Black male sexuality is metaphorically castrated as white men chop down these mighty dusky-colored trees.”
“The Middle East? Brother Macon laments the monies lavished on unstable foreign governments while people barely survive in the ghettos of this country and Rick James languishes in jail. The U.S. has been an unwanted world policeman far too long. Let these people work it out themselves, shit.”
“Extraterrestrials? Fool, Macon Detornay is down with aliens. How you think them Nubian motherfuckers built the pyramids while white folks were still gnawing on pterodactyl wings? The black man, in his glory, been visited by alien races who passed the wisdom of the cosmos to the elders of Ancient Egypt. Knowledge that.”
“Interracial relationships? Let’s put it this way: Back in the day, the most threatening thing a black man could have wasn’t a gun, or an education, it was a white woman. Scared white folks so much they’d lynch him on the spot. Nowadays, what’s the one thing that makes a black man a thousand times less intimidating? A white woman on his arm. So yes, interracial marriage may eventually dismantle racism by producing millions of mixed babies, but not until it’s provided just the kind of symbolic black emasculation that America so yearns for in the first place.”
Organizations checked in around the clock to pledge their allegiance, register their dismay, and confess their confusion. Matzel Toffee Candyworks, a Lower East Side confectionery run by three Jewish brothers, was the first business to declare its support, offering to distribute free sweets at the rally. The proprietors had grown up watching the Last Poets perform in Harlem, and the lyric “they have stuck lollipops up the asses of our leaders to pacify their Black Power farts” had inspired them to get into the candy game.
Many of the businesses Logan approached for Day of Apology sponsorship wanted nothing to do with the rally, so the CEO curved her sales pitches accordingly. Domino’s Pizza, notorious right-wingers, had been happy to commit three hundred pies once Logan explained that she was throwing an all-white rally for racial solidarity.
Most of the major rap record labels, realizing that thousands of white people willing to troll the streets apologizing to blacks represented their dream demographic, had offered free performances and sound systems for the event. Andre, as chief of staff, had booked only the two groups that seemed the most threatening: the Ann Petry Dish, a soul-singing, rhyme-slinging trio from Queens, and the Spooks Who Sit by the Door, a Chicago-based collective of MCs whose self-produced debut, COINTELPROBLACK, spoke passionately about decapitating and skull-fucking FBI agents, schoolteachers, and anybody who didn’t celebrate when Orenthal J. Simpson was declared not guilty.
Macon had invited the People’s Revolutionary Guerrilla Theatre to perform any scene they felt appropriate, and for some reason clear only to themselves they had decided on the marriage of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra from Euripides’ obscure play Strange But True Greek Wedding Night Follies. Nique had tried to impress upon them the importance of performing something relevant, and suggested a scene from Dutchman, but they replied that they refused to be pigeonholed and Macon advised his Minister of Information to drop it.
Busloads of supporters, including the entire active Killer Crip population of Topeka, Kansas, and a Macon Detornay Fan Club comprising a dozen teenybopper girls from Dallas, were expected to descend on the city in what was rapidly becoming a major tourist event. Newsweek’s incendiary “The New Face of Hate” piece had reported on a small but worrisome delegation of bigots from North Dakota, interviewed as they loaded pickup trucks with jerky, beer, and shotguns for the trip to New York, where they planned to “not apologize to no niggers for nothing.” Teen Steam Magazine ’s answer piece, “The New Face of Hot,” had launched a few buses itself; Macon’s robust upper lip and dreamy eyes were winning him support among people who couldn’t have cared less what came out of his mouth.
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