Angry Black White Boy

by Adam Mansbach

  “Columbia is auditing us,” she said. “They know you got arrested at our meeting, and they think you gave the BSU the money from the—”

  Nique, in the middle of a new conversation but standing back-to-back with Macon and monitoring this one, turned his head and interjected. “Alleged money.”

  “Alleged money,” repeated Amy. “From the alleged robberies. So now they’re looking into our financial records, which means they’re going to find out that we’re insolvent because nobody came to Karen’s stupid Come As Your Favorite Broadway Character dance last spring. We need money, Macon. And as I was telling your roommate”—she ushered him back into grace with a smile, and Andre bounded to her side and backed her with a steady head nod, feeling like a Pip—“it would really help us out if you’d be our Black History Month speaker. You’re a major draw.”

  Macon’s grin felt huge even to him. “I’d love to,” he said.

  “Wonderful.” She nodded to her umbrella bearers, and lifted a thumb-and-pinkie telephone to her ear. “I’ll give you a bell.”

  The Tourettic, high-end jerking of synthesized horn stabs, whistles, and sirens cut short further political pleasantries, and three-hundred-plus heads whirled to see a neon-green-streaked van pull to the curb, quivering with earthquake bass.

  “They’re here,” Nique enthused, turning to throw an arm around The Franchise. Macon scowled at him, refusing to shape the obvious question into words. “I been trying to tell you, dude. Rebel Yells is doing a segment on you. International exposure.” He smiled with self-satisfaction and presented a fist for Macon to boom. “Who’s your boy, Moves?”

  “Are you kidding me? The MTV show that interviews pretty-boy actors about nuclear proliferation and then acts like mufuckers are radicals? That tails junkie rockers and pretends their tantrums are political?”

  “They do some real shit, too. Your boy KRS been on there.”

  “It was him, Reese Witherspoon, and Iman talking about organic farming, Nique.”

  “Well, they’re here for the Macon Detornay Show today, so get ready to freak some shit. I’ll introduce you.”

  The van door slid open and the music blared out in concentric circles, pushing back the crowd. A fortyish technician wearing a Pantera T-shirt poked his shaggy head out and took quick stock of the audience, then disappeared inside. The techno cut off, and the boho boom-bip of A Tribe Called Quest’s second album, awash in mellow horn loops, silky live bass lines, and abstract poetics, replaced it at a lower decibel. A good choice, Macon had to admit. It was a perennial progressive favorite, an album white college kids bumped in their dorm rooms, feeling hip, included, unthreatened, and hard-rocks acknowledged as a classic, a beat fiend’s uncut fix. Musical crossover without compromise, something neophytes and old-schoolers alike could dig. An album that, when it dropped in ’91, made even novice listeners self-righteous and indignant about the other directions the music was taking. My First Album and This Is What Hip Hop Should Be wrapped into one.

  Eight young women, outfitted for spring break in Miami, bounced from a second vehicle. They surrounded the music van and squealed with wholesome sexy delight, shaking ass and tits to the music, whipping manes of hair back and forth over their shoulders and smiling invitations to the hoodied-down default-position-surly I don’t wanna see no dancin’ / I’m sick of that shit / Listen to the hit nine-decca stalwart b-folks, who looked at them and then each other and then patted their breast pockets on this-shit’s-too-bugged bluntquests.

  So that’s where girls like that come from, thought Andre. Crates of beverages appeared along the dancing girl circle’s perimeter, and the crowd edged forward suspiciously to squint at the proffered refreshments. Andre craned his neck to read the flowing script air-brushed on the van’s side: When a Rebel Gets Thirsty, a Rebel Yells Fruitopia.

  “A toast,” Nique said, returning from the front with three bottles of Revolutionary Raspberry Iced Tea and distributing them to his cohorts. “To The Franchise. The baddest whiteboy going. Personally, I still think you’re full of shit, but hell, go ’head and keep proving me wrong. Let’s take it to the stage.” He bent the bottle skyward and gulped the sugary contents until his Adam’s apple piston-pumped.

  “I’ll drink to that,” said Andre quickly, hoping his roommate would let it go and knowing there was no way.

  “Full of shit how?” Macon inquired.

  “In all the usual fake-martyr, last-ferry-to-the-mainland ways. Don’t take it as a dis, though, dog. It’s more of a disclaimer.”

  Macon pursed his lips so hard they whitened. “Fair enough.” For all his rhetoric, he tired easily of black people’s skepticism; by now, he expected to be off the hook. “Maybe I am. But here’s to showing and proving.” Andre exhaled relief.

  Macon took a nip of iced tea and felt it dribble down his throat, dissolving patience. “All right,” he said, “let’s do this thing.”

  “They’ve got some kind of soundstage by the vans, it looks like,” Andre observed, standing on tiptoe. A wolf pack of dudes had formed around the dancers, hands pocketed and backpack zipper-strings swaying.

  “Fuck a soundstage,” said Macon. “This is my show, not theirs. People can turn around, shut up, and listen.”

  Nique shrugged. “Keep it rugged, I guess.” He took a deep breath and cupped his hands into a makeshift bullhorn. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he bellowed, “children of all ages.” A few dudes half-turned to look at him, without unplanting their feet. “Turn off the fucking music!” Nique yelled, and moments later it faded out. The dancers retreated to their van, donned sweatshirts, and left the doors open to listen. The crowd reshuffled to face Nique, who dropped his hands and paced a little figure eight as he spoke, marking off some territory. Macon, sensing that he’d have to make an entrance of some kind, receded back into the fringes and stood with Andre, the umbrella low enough to shield his face. The rain had eased into a drizzle.

  “I’m about to bring on Macon Detornay,” Nique hollered, drawing claps, whoo-hoos, and whistles from the crowd. He swung his arms, long-striding, bright-voiced. “And I know y’all want to see my man. Right?” The backpacked masses validated the assumption with more noise. A lifetime of viewership had versed them in the tropes of hype-man theatricality; like every audience everywhere, they knew what was expected of them.

  “We got some ground rules for y’all first, though,” continued Nique, scanning the crowd on tiptoe when he hit the far curves of his eight. “Cuz this a poetry reading, yunno? It ain’t a press conference, a rally, or none of that shit. There’ll be a time for all those things, too, but we out here tonight to check out my man’s artistic side, and we out here on the street because this is all about the people, you know what I’m sayin’, coming together and grabbing ourselves some public space instead of paying to be up in some wack-ass club.” He paused, and the crowd took its cue and clapped.

  “We glad to have the media here, but if y’all disrupt the proceedings, you’ll be asked to leave. It’s been a crazy week for Macon, so after he reads he’s gonna break out. You won’t have a chance to talk to him. We don’t mean to be rude, but shit is just a little hectic right now, as I’m sure you can imagine. We appreciate everybody coming out tonight, braving the elements and whatnot, and I hope y’all will stick around afterward and maybe some other poets or rappers or whatever from the audience can do a little something, too. Turn this into an open-mic type thing. Y’all feel me?”

  The audience nodded, offered up low-toned a’ights. A vibrational low point, to be sure, thought Andre, but Nique knew rehyping them was as easy as “So y’all wanna hear Macon?”

  “Yeah!”

  “One more time: Are y’all ready for Macon Detornay?”

  “Yeah!”

  Macon stepped forward to center stage, into the warm spotlights of the TV trucks, and peeped the mass of clapping human beings gathered in the wetness to hear him. He stared into the crowd as if it were a jungle, and the moment accelerated straight toward him,
rushed at Macon like a tiger leaping from the dense lush greenery and pounced. It knocked him over: the dick-hardening realization that all this was real. People were listening. There were other kids like him out there—right here—skating along the edges of whiteness as disgusted as he was, looking for a leader, a mouthpiece, someone to tell them what to do and validate their angst before it turned sour or misfired or faded. There was enough energy compressed into the sidewalk of this city block alone to set shit thoroughly aflame.

  For the first time, Macon thought about the legions of white people out there who, if they weren’t as committed as he was, were at least highly suggestible. Perhaps even open-minded enough to learn to be self-critical—and it would be cake to make people feel good about being self-critical, venturing far enough outside themselves to analyze and bat around the forces that made them think the way they did. Until they saw where it was going, anyway.

  White liberals did it all the time for kicks: It was an out-of-body experience, an alibi. They reentered themselves warm with the pleasure of self-castigation and went back to whatever they were doing, probably ripping the skin off somebody’s baby daughter. But what if he pulled these kids in and then pulled the plug, caught them in a whirlpool? All that half-conscious, timid whitekid energy beaming down, all those scattershot rays in search of focus and Macon Everett Detornay, magnifying glass. Or Macon Everett Detornay, mirror, flashing that energy back toward the heavens, melting its source like plastic soldiers and remolding them somehow. Wiggers of the world, unite.

  This was getting too goddamn abstract. Macon Everett Detornay, standing on a rainy Harlem block lost in thought with a court date looming and the unharnessed energy of all those white kids shining on nothing but him. He took a mental note: Don’t fuck up and become the toy soldier yourself.

  “This joint is called ‘It’s Your World Tour,’ ” he said. “Because it’s kind of all over the place. I wrote it awhile back, when I was still living in Boston. It’s about, I dunno, a lot of important shit . . . why we’re all so fucked up, I guess. I don’t really know what else to say about it. Last time I read, like half the audience walked out on me, so I hope you guys are a little more receptive.” He got the laugh and began, hoping the crowd wouldn’t notice how much the pages were shaking in his hand.

  peep the dj as counter-revolutionary

  starting one by stopping one

  backspinning beginnings

  cutting space time continuums

  cut & paste drum & bass peep the dj dropping one

  falling to his knees

  in the garden of delights

  transplanting funk perennials

  to bigger flowerpots

  pre moistened

  with the mississippi goddamn water wrung

  from lunchcounter revolutionaries’

  soaking clothes

  pop’s vinyl crackles thru the den

  phil ochs folksingin i ain’t marchin any more

  that’s word

  just sit right here and do my thing

  destruction has two opposites preservation & creation

  plus the ambiguity & dislocation

  of the postmodern moment & my left shoulder

  prevent me from holding signs aloft

  voice too hoarse from rhyming into broken mics to sing along

  we shall over sle-e-eep

  i used to get politically ill back in high school

  make aura drive me to one of those

  hundred deep encounter group weekend retreats

  & wait outside engine running

  white kids united against racism or

  liberal activists for peace love unity & havin fun some shit

  i come in kung fu paper doors down

  with an urn of malcolm x’s ashes balanced on my head

  & start schoolin the masses like a

  sub with a one week

  curriculum jump on his classes

  y’all pretentious no experience

  nonsense talkin guilty conscience

  nonslickniks & hippychicks

  can’t & won’t do shit

  need to sit down & read this this & this

  that was me

  tell the white man in the mirror

  the truth right to his face

  then split

  sometimes girls followed me outside

  guess i was black enough for them revolution is a bitch

  so amidst our talk of change i’d pitch

  pennies at the tattered waxpaper cups

  of those from whom i’d cribbed my strut

  i sure do sympathize bruh man it must be tough

  to shuck an honest buck

  when yo performance space invaded

  by the puma tracks

  of doo doo wack

  backpack rap cats

  who just don’t give a fuck

  makin clique tracks up 6th ave

  with plastic fat beats bags

  & killer crossover vocab

  at least i pledged an oath

  they pledgin hip hop like a frat

  so now i trail behind

  strapped with a notepad

  pretendin to be

  the caucazoid shaharazad ali

  revising the white man’s guide

  to understanding white rappers

  & their sublimated racial pride

  everytime a cracker

  drops a twelve inch single

  these jokers go into

  great white hope

  conniption fits yo this the new shit

  jack they johnsons

  until they bust all over

  the heavyweight tradition

  & wipe up the viscous liquid mess

  with misappropriated quotes

  yo rakim said

  it ain’t where you’re from it’s where you’re at

  race privilege where ya at?

  is the caucus mountains in the hooooouuusse? ho-oooo!

  mufuckers so self-righteous

  they wanna talk about the racism

  that makes black people

  think whiteboys can’t rhyme

  but the new shit

  is the same ol shit

  you shitheads

  understanding culture from the essence of the root of the tree

  and not just from the leaves falling to the ground

  as drum one said

  before he skipped the continent himself

  i gotta be invisible for a minute

  he told me on the phone

  & by the same time next week

  was gone

  imagine that this is a cat who made

  high profile invisibility an artform

  cleaving thru parties on the diggy low

  in camo suits and shades

  pretendin not to know

  that he’s a legend

  with styles & names

  trapped beneath the paintjobs

  of a zillion trains

  i tried to catch him in bologna

  but all i saw was

  two drum walls

  each one bout ten feet wide

  & ten feet tall

  clearly visible

  from the passing eurorail

  that’s what i’m talkin bout

  canvas the neighborhood

  each one

  a swooshing graceful

  hydra snake of steaming color

  interlocking triple jointed

  & seeming to spin slower & faster

  perpetual & self-sufficient

  a maze of motion

  the perfect power source professor

  if only he would tell us how it works

  pinks moving into blues & green

  exotic shades of sunrise flesh & plasma

  radiating in n out themselves a

  miscegeny swirl of statement & magenta

  bubbling & bulging

  with the struggle of containing itself

  along preposterous smooth curves &

/>   ginsu racing edges

  i wish i’d been with him when he

  perfected graff

  but i was tied up in

  mrs joseph’s kindergarten art class

  making those drawings

  where you rub a craypa

  vibrancy of color mishmash

  over the whole page

  & cover it with black

  then paperclip scrape

  a little bit back off & bam

  you got an art project

  thin raised welts of color all that’s left

  enough to get

  a kid like me

  diznizzy with regret

  depressed by those pathetic silhouettes

  & wishin just once mrs joseph

  would let me leave my shit

  unbuffed uncuffed & scuffed

  lucky for me i wrote with my left

  & thus kept

  a smudged n smeary copy

  of all my work on hand

  so maybe long before i boosted a spray can

  or picked up a pen to chisel myself

  into the piece of work i am

  i was filling in the

  overlapping panel of this

  human venn diagram

  connecting culture to belief & who we are to what we be

  makes sense to me but see

  you gotta understand

  i come from a fam steeped

  generations deep

  in contradiction

  not even my ancestors could enter a temple

  without clenching their fists

  against the bullshit that was religion

  but everybody always felt culturally jewish

  i couldn’t even say that much until

  my homegirl

  told me about golems

  these mythic kabbalistic

  jewish mystic

  anti-pogrom

  secret weapons

  unbeatable warrior giants

  inscribed with the hebrew word for truth

  & made of clay

  that come alive

  entered by whatever

  spirit you summon when you pray

  & fuck up

  all your enemies

  like a supernatural bruce willis

  when they’re finished

  you erase the alef

  turning truth to death

  & they die

  i was like damn

  i never knew us jews

  had some shit like that on our side

  hell i’m down just show me where to sign

  that’s the type of ally