by Mat Johnson
“It’s ten dollars,” Mandingo says, a bit nervously, as he stares at Issue 2 in my hands. I look back at him.
“Ten dollars?” I ask, in a tone that inadvertently reveals that ten dollars is a significant percentage of my current net worth. My dad left me a little money, but I won’t get access to those accounts for weeks.
“Printing costs,” he explains, as I give him his first sale of the day.
—
I’m going to burn my fucking house down. This thought relaxes me as panic rises. This thought worked last night, let me close my eyes despite the break-in. Everything’s going to be okay. Because I’m going to burn my fucking house down and get rich. And I’m going to give Becks her money, with interest. I checked—it’s insured for a fortune more than whatever I could clear after paying for all the repairs. I’ll get the money and run to Costa Rica or Iceland and live off that shit forever. It’s foolish and a desperate plan, but I accept that I am a foolish and desperate individual, so it’s perfect. I’m going to find a way to burn the damned thing down that makes it look like an accident. You have to be a big man to admit total failure, and I’m just tall enough. Hey, let’s face it, this life sucks. It is not going to get much better. I have no future to look forward to so I might as well indulge in the present. My path led into a briar patch barely worth detangling from, but that doesn’t mean I have to walk the road my father paved for me either. I’m going to burn it down and move to maybe Tahiti or anyplace else I can live off the earnings till I die of something soft like diabetes from too much fresh fruit.
I get up and walk around the table, take a look, compliment Mandingo on anything I can see of merit in his art, but that isn’t much. Mostly I smile and nod. I’m not trying to look down on his skills, but he’s just not good. The pain is because I know I’m not either. And I’m older. Competence isn’t enough. It would be great to be good at something. No, I would like to be great, to be great at something: public or personal, major or minor, I don’t really care at this point. Mandingo stands up and helps spread out his pamphlet comics so that they can be witnessed in all their glory, and I see he has on some kind of wrestler’s belt. I think this is for the special occasion, for this day. Some of the crowd are dressed even more flamboyantly. But even the most freakish who do dare to flutter closer to this dark corner can see the ineptitude and disperse again. An old Jewish guy comes to my table for a minute and picks up my graphic novel from the pile I’ve arranged. He looks at the cover, then he looks at me, then repeats this back-and-forth gesture for a while. “You’re him,” he says. It’s not a question. He doesn’t even open the book, he just holds it up to a teenage girl behind him, a granddaughter clearly, and says, “This is him.” She nods, but demonstratively averts her eyes from mine the moment I look up at her.
This girl with her grandpa, she lingers in front of my table, she has my book. She looks, like, sixteen and wears a tight T-shirt and shorts that manage to do no more than cover the place where her tan legs meet her torso. Looking at her, I know I am an old man, because all I have the urge to do is wrap her in a blanket until I can get her to the Gap and buy her some clothes that fit. She holds my book in front of her like a shield.
“You know, I can sign that for you,” I tell her. “If I ever go nuts, try to blow up the Statue of Liberty or something, that would make it worth something.”
She doesn’t laugh. She just puts on a smile too big for her face and then spins and stomps away from me. Off to the other end of the room, where her grandfather is watching the whole scene.
“Oh yeah, here we go. It’s showtime now.” Mandingo talks to himself, not me. He’s got a fishing box full of art supplies, and he starts pulling them out. I look up and I see a whole pack of black guys moving in, high school age mostly, some older.
“My fan base has arrived,” Mandingo says right before they do. Of course he has a fan base. The worse the artist, the better the marketing campaign. There’s four of them, and Mandingo knows each by their first name. I hear them talking, and the intimacy of their knowledge of each other’s lives is surprising. Turns out they follow one another on Twitter. They blow 140-character kisses at each other all day. These guys, they ask me a lot of questions. Polite, interested ones, and by the way they won’t look me in the eye I can tell they looked me up before I got here. The usual questions come: when did you start, what’s your favorite thing to draw, what book would you most like to be assigned to. Then this one lands:
“How come you ain’t got more positive dark-skinned characters in your work?” one of them asks me. He asks it three times, too. The first time, I hear it, but it’s barely audible, just above the din of the room, just low enough that I can ignore it, which I do. I can feel the dread building, but I swallow it for later consumption. About fifteen seconds later the question comes louder, but I keep staring down at the charcoal in my hands, drawing. This time, it’s clear I’m ignoring the asker, that I’m not trying to play these race games, having reached my quota for the hour. Mandingo, for his part, offers to show the crew some of his new work, the pencils for his next issue of Afro-Dike-Y. Apparently, she is fighting a villain named Brickhouse, who from appearances seems to have been driven criminally insane by elephantiasis of the boobies. Some of the guys, distracted or flinching from confrontation, move closer to Mandingo’s side of the table and oooh. But not this kid. He just asks the same damn thing all over again, so loud that even silence would be an answer to him.
I look up, and of course he is the lightest-skinned one here besides me. Of course he is. This defender of the darker masses. And what am I to say to him? I didn’t write this work, I just drew it. They sent me a script, and I drew it. The characters, they all came with descriptions of how they looked, which were mostly based on images of famous people of the period, and I was given the images of those people as well. The guy who wrote it did this, not me. The guy who wrote it, go pick on him. The guy who wrote it, a guy I’ve never met or even talked to on the phone, he really might be color struck, but not me. You can get his email from his website. I’m sure he would love to hear from you.
I tell him this, and I am exhausted from it. I stay chipper though, smiling, and we are both relieved. If we were the type of people who enjoyed confrontation, we would have put down the comics years ago and started punching people in the face for real, instead of just looking at illustrated violence.
He buys a book, has me sign it to “Leon.” Shakes my hand front and then sideways and ends it with a snap. With the final handshake test, I have proven I am black. I have returned to America to defend my Negro title triumphantly. Again I have used the timbre in my voice to show that I too speak the language, that I do not distance myself from him. I have temporarily compensated for my paler skin, my straightish hair, and the fact that my dad was a honky. I have passed the exam presented to me. Yay. Don’t we all feel so much fucking better now? Wee-ha. Aren’t we all just one big happy family? Woo.
They loiter. I laugh a little too hard at a joke, stuck in the gear of overcompensation, and then feel someone watching me. The teenage girl sits on the floor directly across the room from me, her back against the wall. My book is still in her hands, resting in the lap made by her folded legs, her Jew-fro like a chestnut cloud floating. The book is open, but she’s staring at me. She appears as disgusted as I am by my inadequacies.
A good twenty minutes in, we’ve basically formed a Little Africa. Other black folks come in, some fans, some in the industry, and pool in our corner of the room. We talk about how so few white people will come to our corner of the convention, and joke until we convert our unease to laughter. We make reference to other legendary black superheroes, artists, writers, like they are our secret gods. There is a “we,” and I am included. I revel in the conspiracy. When the mandatory light-skinned joke is made, dismissing a prominent illustrator for not being black enough, I laugh loudest. Aha, those light-skinned folks, with their moderately less stigmatized lives. I don’t care because I haven
’t been around black Americans in a group in a while and missed the camaraderie. I miss my family. I want to belong in my family. I want acknowledgment of shared experience, worldview, ancestry. I have no more real family, I realize within the fragile bliss. My father’s gone, Becks is gone, but in this moment it’s less painful for me. I fit in and I don’t fit in but it feels so good not to be thrown out. I see Caucasians in the room, looking over our way, puzzled and annoyed by the segregation. They stand in a pack of their own race, but their own race is invisible to them.
—
The group from around the table makes its way over to the conference room, and that means there is even a crowd worth facing. I sit with Mandingo and a few others as three dozen or so audience members space out in the chairs so the room seems less empty.
“What is it like as a black artist creating comics?” The first question goes. Serve, volley, pass the microphone. Mandingo answers it. I don’t pay attention to what he says. I pay attention to what he says when he finishes, because he actually passes the microphone to me next to answer. And as Caucasoidal as I am, as racially ambiguous—again, again, because it never goes away—I still talk to them about my experiences as a black man in comics and the predominantly black crowd actually listens. No one stops me. No one stands up and yells “Fraud!” and challenges me to name the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. They just listen. The people sitting onstage with me accept my presence, so the crowd does too. My self-loathing at the glee I take from this is overshadowed by the joy itself. The usual questions follow: How do you break in to the field? What’s your advice to an up-and-coming black artist? If you could work on any project, what would it be? I have answers prepared, prepackaged, marinated in whole milk in the fridge overnight. They love them. I am pithy. I am witty. As a child I worried about rejection, that my own community would gather together and cast me out like a bleached ugly duckling. My life’s fight has been to prove I’m a swan. That has brought me to this moment. Now, surrounded by the superhero imagery of my youth, I flap my wings. Look at me y’all! Let me shake my tail feather. I’m a swan, yo!
We’re hitting the zone known as Final Questions, when I hear a female voice ask, “But what is it like for you, as a biracial artist creating comic books?”
Mandigo looks out, brown hand grabbing the mike to answer, then stops. His mouth goes to say something, yet his jaw stutters free of sound. He looks confused. Then looks at me. I don’t know how I look. I’m pretty sure someone just called me out as a race traitor. The b-word, leaned on in the middle of the sentence, pushed like the last paste in the tube.
Squinting to see over the stage lights, I make out a standing woman, facing me, a looming triangle of shadow. I think it’s that creepy teenager, but it’s not. The questioner is in the back, on the left-hand side of the hall near the exit. When I shade the stage lights with my hand, I see she’s dressed in flowing white wrinkled layers like a toga. She’s a goddess. Or dressed up like one—she’s got the crown of golden leaves on and everything. When the others on the stage next to me begin to whisper, I realize I still haven’t said anything.
“Well, I don’t think of myself as a ‘biracial’ artist,” I say, laying my tongue on the b, pushing the word back to her. “I’m black, and I’m an artist. I’m a guy who draws pictures. I mean, that’s the ultimate freedom, isn’t it? To define oneself as a human being! Is ‘Human Being’ not a category? I draw my doodles inside the confines of boxes, but I refuse to let the preconceived boxes of others define me.”
There’s applause. I start to join in too, then decide that’s bad form. And I don’t really know what I’ve just said, as far as meaning. I have found that, in the African American oral tradition, if the words are enunciated eloquently enough, no one examines the meaning for definitive truth. So even the folks on the panel clap. There’s a little murmur in the room, and people are looking back at this woman. They look at her, because she is pale but brown, but now she has told all of them she is other. She is the traitor of blackness. I wait for her shadow to get smaller, for her to be diminished by the crowd’s disdain. But she just stands there.
Her stillness disquiets the audience. It grows silent, save for awkward shuffles. As she steps down the stadium stairs toward me, her sandals clap for her, and that’s all the approval she needs. “But why do you call yourself a black artist, in this age? You’re mixed, aren’t you? I mean, clearly one of your parents was white, or you wouldn’t look like that. Why do you find the need stick within the racial mold set by slavery?”
She looks like me. My tribe. Same skin color, same hair color, same eye color. I know one of her parents must be white as well. So she knows. My whole origin story. She could be my twin. I saw another lost fraternal twin once on Fifteenth and Walnut, in the summer, when I was sixteen. I only saw her for two seconds, maybe for four, before she turned off the sidewalk and into an air-conditioned boutique. A woman of my comparative height and general physiognomic presentation, a woman so instantly familiar I have thought of her for decades. I’ve thought of her and the idea that there could be someone walking around on this earth who was your mirror. That if you found them, if you connected with them, joined with them, you would never again feel alone. I believe this insanity as I believe that the rest of this auditorium can’t see her the way I do: we all have different brains, her image only unlocks mine. The room looks at the stage, where I am frozen. They don’t see the pale black man anymore, I’m sure. They look at me and now they see the fraud. The whole room. I can see Mandingo facing me with his body, with his jihadi beard, and I see myself through his eyes. And this is enough to bring my mind back into the reality of the moment again. To myself, not some attractive stranger. My hair is straight, my skin drained of melanin by three centuries of miscegenation with a final erasure courtesy of my father’s Irish seed. In my head, I hear someone yell “Honky!” but just in my head. No one moves, except her. Until she’s mere feet away, then she stops, puts her hands on her hips. Waiting. In the room, no one says anything. I want to say something to her, to talk to her, but the room is looking at me, changing me with their judgment, and I can’t handle that so I speak to them instead.
“There’s nothing ‘mold-y’ about being black,” I say, and there’s laughs. It’s sparse, from the back of the room. Away from her. “And there is no such thing as ‘biracial’ in Black America. Race doesn’t even exist,” I tell her. I stand up, push the chair out with my calves. Not violently, but enough to make a screeching declaration. “There’s black, and there’s white. That’s it. It doesn’t matter if your sperm donor was a white man. That’s the reality. Was Booker T. Washington not black? Or Frederick Douglass?” There is some applause now, not overwhelming, but building. I hear a “That’s right!” pop out of the audience anonymously, so I build on that. “Or Malcolm X’s mother? His very own mother!” The crowd has decided it’s safe to show appreciation, that by clapping they may obtain freedom from racial complication. “Or Bob Marley. Bob Marley!” I hit the last name hard, let it resonate in the room. They love me even more. I hear “Get up, stand up!” and I hop onstage a bit in response, and there’s laughter. “Is there anyone here, anyone in this room, anyone in this world, who thinks that Bob Marley was any less of a black man?” I demand, and hold the reggae giant’s legacy in front of me like a shield. No one challenges it. They’re too busy clapping. But they stop looking at me. Now they look at her.
She doesn’t care. She doesn’t care at all, it’s clear. She hears them, she must feel their gaze, but she doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t raise her voice to qualify. She doesn’t laugh it off or use some other technique to deflect communal rejection. There is no bravery in her stance, because that would mean there was fear to overcome. She stands, just looking at me, undaunted, as if the crowd is mere mirage. It’s an amazing performance. She is real. She is certain. And look at her: she is free. How the hell do you get free?
“Bob Marley!” Mandingo yells in a poor
imitation of a Jamaican accent.
“Get up, stand up!” his crew sings as she turns and walks back up the aisle, and the rest of the room laughs, takes to its feet. I try to laugh along. Then she looks over her shoulder and laughs too. At me. She doesn’t care.
Mandingo slaps my back and starts clapping. I’m smiling, nodding, but instead of feeling victorious I feel something of worth drain out of me with every step she takes away. The crowd joins the song, and the beat of the clapping takes up the rhythm section. Now everyone’s happy. But I look at her. I keep looking at her. She is back in her seat, the only person in the room not standing. Staring back at me, hands on her lap. As rejected as I feared I would be, and perfectly composed, at peace with it.
When the panel is finally over, when the final clapping drifts off, I stand up and head straight for the lady. I have been rude, I know, and that hurts me, so I hustle into the filling aisle. She’s almost faster than I am, has her big bag over her shoulder, moving to the exit. The straps of her white dress are made of yarn and I tap her shoulder around the fragile fabric.
“Miss, I’m sorry if I was too vehement. It’s just important to me that people understand—”
“I’m from the Mélange Center, a mixed-race community organization. You know, I do outreach to mixed speakers all the time, but I have never—” She pauses, then gives a short chuckle. Up close, partially obscured behind the curtains of her hair, there are the faint traces of acne scars, there’s the wrinkles around her neck, the imperfections of reality. But there’s also a thickness, a fullness of body and personality. As I stare, she pulls back her hair and leans in to whisper in my ear.
“You’re the worst sunflower I’ve ever seen. I feel so sorry for you,” she says. There’s so much disdain in her enunciation of the light little word, sunflower, that I look down to hide my grin at the odd imbalance.
