“Are you all familiar with gangsta rap?” McPherson asked. We were, despite the fact that, besides me, all of the students were white and mostly middle to upper class. While we each nodded our familiarity with the genre, McPherson reached into a shopping bag he’d brought and removed a magazine. He opened it to a premarked page on which was a picture of a rapper, cloaked in jewelry and guns and leaning against the hood of a squad car. Behind him was a sprawling slum. “This person raps about the ghetto,” McPherson said, “but he doesn’t live in the ghetto. He lives in a wealthy white suburb with his wife and daughter. His daughter attends a predominantly white private school. That’s what this article is about.” He closed the magazine and returned it to the bag. “What some gangsta rappers are doing is using black stereotypes because white people eat that stuff up. But these images are false, they’re dishonest. Some rappers are selling out their race for personal gain.” He paused again, this time to hold up my story. “That’s what this writer is doing with his work.” He sat my story back on the table. “Okay, that’s all I have to say. You can discuss it now.”
For a few seconds, the only sound in the room was my labored breathing. And then someone said, “McPherson’s right. The story is garbage.”
“Complete rubbish,” said another.
And so it went from there.
I did not sleep that night. At 8:00 AM, when I could hold out no longer, I called McPherson at home and demanded a conference. He agreed to meet me in his office in ten minutes.
He was there when I arrived, sitting behind his desk. The desk was bare except for a copy of my story, and the office was bare except for the desk and two chairs. The built-in bookshelves held nothing, and nothing hung on the walls. There was no dressing on the window, no telephone, and no computer. It might have been the janitor’s office, a place to catch a few winks while the mopped floors dried. And McPherson might have been the janitor. His blue shirt was a mass of wrinkles and his eyes were bloodshot. His trademark hat, a beige straw Kangol, seemed to rest at an odd angle on his head; from beneath it a single long braid had worked its way free and dangled rebelliously behind his right ear. He noticed me staring at it and poked it back into concealment.
“Are you okay?” he asked. His voice was gentle, full of concern. “You sounded like a crazy man on the phone.”
“Well, I’m not a crazy man.” I reached forward to tap my finger on my story and proceeded to rant and rave as only a crazy man could. “I did not make this stuff up,” I insisted. “I’m from the ghetto.” I went through the characters one by one, citing various relatives on whom they were based, and I mentioned that, just the week before, my younger brother had been shot in the back while in McDonald’s. I told him I had another brother who was in and out of prison, a heroin-addict sister-in-law, that I had once been arrested for car theft (falsely, but that was beside the point), and that many, many of my friends were presently still living in the miserable community in which I’d been raised. “You misread my story,” I said in conclusion, “and you misread me.” I leaned back and folded my arms across my chest, waiting for his apology. Instead, I watched as he sprang from his chair and hurried from the room. He turned left into the hall, and a moment later he passed going right, with Frank Conroy calling after him, and then they passed left again, now with Connie Brothers, the program’s administrator, in tow, and after two more passes this awful parade came to an end somewhere out of view. Then Connie stood before me, looking as nauseated as I felt. “Jim is the kindest soul on this earth,” she said quietly. “Why, why would you insult him?”
For an instant I saw myself at fourteen, looking at a closed front door, behind which was my first love, who had just dumped me and left me standing on her porch trying unsuccessfully not to cry.
Connie magically produced a tissue and handed it to me. She rubbed my shoulders while I rambled incoherently, something about sleep deprivation and McPherson being my father. “It’s okay, sweetie,” Connie said. “I’ll talk to him.”
McPherson returned momentarily. I apologized. He told me it was okay, that workshops can make people uptight and sensitive. It had been difficult for him too, he explained, when he was a student there in the 1970s. There was a lull in the conversation before he said, “So, where’re your people from?”
He still doesn’t believe me, I thought. I mumbled, “Chicago.”
“No, no. That’s where they are. Where are they from?”
“Oh, sorry. Arkansas.”
“Mine are from Georgia,” he said. He smiled and added, “That place is a motherfucker.”
The essence of black America was conveyed in that response, a toughness of spirit, humor laced with tragedy, but at that moment all I saw was the man who had rejected my vision. Defeated, I thanked him for agreeing to meet with me as I rose to leave. He stood and shook my hand. As I was walking out the door, he called my name. I turned to face him.
“Stereotypes are valuable,” he said. “But only if you use them to your advantage. They present your readers with something they’ll recognize, and it pulls them into what appears to be familiar territory, a comfort zone. But once they’re in, you have to move them beyond the stereotype. You have to show them what’s real.”
“What’s real?” I asked.
Without hesitation he said, “You.”
It was one of those things that you instantly recognize as profound, and then, because you don’t quite understand it, try to forget as quickly as you can. It was also one of those things that you cannot forget. And so it roamed freely in my subconscious, occasionally coming into sharp focus to remind me of its presence, but I allowed myself to be consumed by it no more than I would a housefly. For about a year. And then I went to see him again.
“I was wondering,” I said, “if you wouldn’t mind supervising an independent project.”
“That depends,” he responded, “on what you’d like to study.”
“Me,” I said. “I want to study me.”
We started with black folklore and history. Next we moved on to blues and jazz, and then we covered a broad range of black literature and culture. We studied black intellectuals and philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists, activists, filmmakers, and ex-cons. We dissected nearly every aspect of black life and thought, and in the process a theme emerged that had been there all along: Life is a motherfucker; living it anyway, and sometimes laughing in the process, is where humanity is won.
And this is what I learned about me: I had become my own stereotype, a character in one of my short stories who insisted on seeing himself primarily as a repository of pain and defeat, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The very people with whom I had been raised and whom I had dedicated myself to rendering in prose had become victims of my myopia. My stories showed people being affected by drug addiction, racism, poverty, murder, crime, violence, but they said nothing about the spirit that, despite being confronted with what often amounted to certain defeat, would continue to struggle and aspire for something better.
That old slave song “We Shall Overcome” pretty much says it all.
BAD OUTCOMES
At 10:00 PM the bank’s parking lot contained only one car. Six of us were crouched behind it. The bank’s rear door was thirty feet away. When it opened, we sprinted toward the hand that waved us in.
Our shoes were damp from snow and squeaked loudly on the lobby’s tiles. The shrill noise vanished when we reached the carpeted stairs, replaced by rapid thumps and heavy breathing. The building’s warmth had felt pretty good when we’d entered, but by the time we reached the third floor I was hot and sweaty. I pulled off my skullcap and stuffed it inside my parka; then I took off my parka and hung it on a coatrack to my right, near the massive vault. The others had already done the same, and now they pulled chairs from desks and positioned them around the one in the far right corner, which belonged to Tim. Tim sat behind it, lighting a joint. The two bottles of wine we’d brought were already in circulation.
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sp; We had been doing this for several months, since one of Tim’s professors had landed him a high-paying internship with a local bank. Tim was an accountant, scheduled to work from nine at night to five in the morning, an otherwise lonely assignment had he not regularly invited Jimmy, me, and four of our friends there to keep him company. It was risky behavior, fraught with potentially bad outcomes, such as the forgotten half-smoked joint we’d leave that would get Tim fired and expelled from school. But that wouldn’t be for several weeks; for now I was impressed with our audacity, and every now and then I’d pause to marvel at the fact of seven black males in such close proximity to millions of dollars, getting stoned.
At around 1:00 or 2:00 AM we’d leave, the long trip home sobering us enough to sneak back into our homes without waking our parents, though sometimes Jimmy drank too much, making it difficult to get him all the way to our upstairs bedroom.
On one of those early mornings, after I’d gotten Jimmy to our room, I led him to his bed and then collapsed on my own, only to wake a few minutes later to the sound of his vomiting. Linda did too; I sat up to see her standing in our doorway in her pajamas, backlit by the lamp she’d turned on in her room across the hall. “You have to stop this,” she pleaded as she sat next to me.
“What?” I grinned, barely suppressing a laugh. “We’re just having some fun.”
“There’ll be plenty of time for fun when you’re older. For now you need to focus on school.”
I thought of the taunting and the hoodlums, of the courses too easy to hold my interest, and suddenly my substance-induced giddiness was gone. I looked toward the floor and mumbled, “I hate school.”
“But that’s okay. You just have to get through it.”
“I can’t get through it.”
“Yes you can.”
I shook my head. “It’s not the right place for me.”
“Then think about what is,” she said. “Think about the future. Where do you want to be in five years? Where do you see yourself being?”
How could I see myself being somewhere in five years, I wondered, when I couldn’t see myself being anywhere now? “You don’t understand,” I whined, but I didn’t really either, so I simply repeated this phrase over and over, as if doing so would make the understanding come. It didn’t. But Linda was patient with me; she waited until I’d worked myself to tears before removing my shoes and tucking me under the covers. And then she went to help Jimmy, who, it must have seemed to her, needed her more.
WE ARE AMERICANS
I was midair, somewhere above the Atlantic, when I stopped being black. I was informed of it two days later. “Now you are colored,” I was told.
“What does that mean,” I asked, “colored?”
“It means you are not black, like you were in America.”
“Am … am I …white?”
“No, but you are very, very close. Close enough that the blacks here will hate you.”
Here was Harare, Zimbabwe, where Brenda and I would live for two months while she conducted her dissertation research. Her goal was to document the murals women painted on their homes in the rural areas, but first we had to live in the capital city so she could work in the national archives. During the two days since our arrival, I’d noticed that some of the locals weren’t particularly friendly; I’d just asked our hostess Farai about our rude reception. She was surprised that we hadn’t been warned, especially by Brenda’s father, since this was his native land. Farai was his niece.
“Oh, yes,” Farai continued. “Your time here with the blacks will be very, very difficult.”
“What about with the whites?” Brenda asked.
Farai smiled. “They will hate you as well, but not as much.”
Just like that, I’d been cast in The Twilight Zone, in an episode on racial purgatory. Brenda had had experience with this sort of thing, being the child of a mixed marriage, but both my parents were black, certified Negroes from lands of “chitlins” and cotton. I had been black for thirty-one years, and now my caramel complexion and nappy hair had somehow betrayed me. I was stunned, confused beyond measure. Farai offered us some tea.
This was 1995, fifteen years after the start of Zimbabwe’s democratic rule. Prior to that, it was an apartheid state. Whites had controlled the country, despite being less than 5 percent of the population, and they’d decided that an even smaller percentage of the population, people of mixed ancestry, the coloreds, should be next in line. Coloreds were provided good schools and housing. They were hired for cushy jobs. They were granted the right to vote. And, according to Farai, they exercised their right to be snide. Now blacks were in power. It was payback time.
“But, but …,” I stammered, “we are Americans.”
“All the worse,” Farai responded.
“Why?”
“Blacks hate Americans, too.”
“Why?”
“Because Americans are rich.”
“Not all of them,” I told her, but by comparison this wasn’t true. Seventy percent of black Zimbabweans were poor, poor in a way that I had not understood, even though I’d been raised in projects and slums. Harare was full of beggars, more naked than not, smelly, dirty, sick, and occasionally missing limbs. Those who could walk had followed us for long periods with their hands extended, and those who could not tugged at our pant legs or called out to us as we passed. I had made a concerted effort to ignore these things, since the African experience I had envisioned for myself had been entirely uplifting, bordering on the spiritual, much in the way that visiting Mecca had been for Malcolm X. Only better. After all, I, a descendant of African slaves, was returning to the motherland, home of the men and women who had endured the middle passage’s horrors to bequeath me their genes. And now I was back to claim my long-denied birthright—a sense of belonging, a sense of place. Just the thought of it had brought me to tears.
And it had brought my sister Linda to tears too. In recent years, she’d become obsessed with her ancestral roots, filling her apartment with items purchased from African art peddlers who traveled through black communities like gypsies, doing brisk business from the trunks of their cars. Her walls held a number of imposing masks, their backs scrawled with the name of a country and an exotic-sounding tribe. Brenda, who was completing her doctorate in African art history, knew instantly that all of the items were fakes, but she didn’t have the heart to tell my sister, as I would later not have the heart to tell her that Africa—at least the one of our imaginations—wasn’t real either. “And this one,” Linda would say to us, pointing toward a lopsided wooden head with the teeth of a walrus and the horns of a ram, “was made by the Pee-ack-boo of Nigeria.” While we nodded thoughtfully, she’d stand there beaming in her mud-cloth gown, leaning on one of her intricately carved canes, the small head of a god snug in the palm of her hand.
A week before we’d left, Linda had thrown a “Back to Africa” party in our honor. She’d spent hours making an “African feast” of fried chicken and catfish, collard greens, neck bones, oxtails, sweet potatoes, and potato salad. Standing at the head of the picnic table, she’d raised her forty-ounce of malt liquor high in the air and spoken passionately of how important it was to maintain our bond with the ancestors, how fortunate I was to be able to take this trip, and how, thanks to me, the severed link with our African kin would soon be restored. And then she tilted the bottle to offer libations, which evoked a gasp from our brother Tim, who staggered drunkenly toward the falling liquid with cupped hands.
I think I cried during her speech. I know I cried on the plane. When our slow descent at last brought the motherland into view, I wiped my eyes and tried to say the words I’m home but found I was too emotional to speak. By the time our wheels skipped across the tarmac, I sobbed openly; this, I imagined, was what it felt like for a long-held hostage to at last be freed. And so it was difficult to accept Farai’s view that, while I had been away in captivity, the locks on the homeland’s doors had been changed.
That night
, as Brenda and I lay in bed trying to make sense of all that her cousin had told us, we decided to reject our colored status. We would simply explain, as often as necessary, that Zimbabwe’s system of racial classification did not apply to us, that we had always been and would always be black. I fell asleep convinced that this would suffice, and the next morning I woke with so much of my idealism about Africa restored that it would take a full three weeks for it to be thoroughly shattered.
The first crack occurred the next day. After spending six hours at the archives, we were driving home when we came upon a military blockade. There were half a dozen cars ahead of us in the queue, and one by one the officers, unsmiling with rifles strapped over their torsos like guitars, interrogated the occupants and sometimes searched their vehicles. When it was our turn, an officer approached me and barked, “Open the boot!”
I did not know what a boot was or how to open one. “Open the what?” I asked.
He did a double take, caused by either my ignorance or my accent. I drew back as he rested his hands on the door and leaned closer, looking from me to Brenda to me again and smelling strongly of tobacco. “Why do you speak this way?” he asked. “Who do you think you are fooling?”
“No … no one,” I said. “We’re Americans.”
He grinned. “Ah, but you are a liar! You live in Chitungwiza. I have seen you there myself many times before.”
“No, no,” I insisted, “we really are Americans. It’s true!”
“Show me your documentation then, Mr. America.”
I retrieved my passport from my backpack and handed it to him. He looked at it only briefly before saying, “But this is not you. This is a white man.”
It was, I admit, an unflattering picture. The flash of the camera had bathed my face in light, making me appear even paler than had Iowa’s overcast winter. Moreover, hours of intense Zimbabwean sun had given me a rich tan. The guard’s confusion was understandable. “I’m not white,” I politely explained. “I’m not colored either, actually. I’m black.”
Street Shadows Page 9
