To stave off cabin fever, Team Detornay ran daily wind sprints in the hallway, testing the weight and breathability of the free gear arriving steadily from hip hop clothing companies hoping Macon would rock their shit in public and double their sales in the suburbs, where legions of whiteboys had finally found coolness personified in someone who looked like them.
“I think I’d feel more comfortable with a bulletproof vest,” Macon announced, returning to the room after a visit to the TV lounge. He crossed the threshold just in time to see Logan and Andre jump away from each other like two suddenly charged batteries and pretend they hadn’t been kissing; Andre turned and hunched over his computer, while Logan busied herself with a copy of High Times that Nique had left behind. Okaaay, thought Macon. Sure, why the hell not. I’ll play along. Whatever.
He walked through the space between them and picked up an envelope from the stack of hate mail piled atop the dresser. He’d taken to defusing such letters by reading them aloud, bumpkin twang and all—Whah doan yeew come ahwn down heayur an’ say them thangs, boy—and to correcting their grammar with a red teacher’s pen. It didn’t help much. He flopped onto the bed, threw his legs up against the wall, and stared at the dangling laces of his Timberlands, feeling vaguely surprised and dimly wounded. Logan sat Indian-style on the floor, just outside his line of sight, and flipped listlessly through her magazine.
“Vests are illegal,” Andre replied in a deliberate monotone, some thirty seconds after Macon’s comment. “A ton of rappers have caught cases for wearing them.”
“The logic being what? That it’s illegal not to die if someone shoots you in the chest?”
Andre shrugged and went back to drawing up the rally schedule on his computer. “Are we gonna let Professor Jenson speak or not?”
“Sure. She’s the only academic who hasn’t reduced me to a sociological aberration. Put her early, though. She’s beside the point with all that gender stuff.”
Logan cut her eyes at Macon, saw that he’d said it just to irritate her, and turned back to her reading.
“Upski and Danny Hoch confirmed, but Khalid Muhammad and Leonard Jefferies still won’t return our calls. Who else can we get to really abuse motherfuckers?”
Macon swung his legs around and sat up, restless. “I figure if shove comes to push, we can call the Black Hebrews.” He wondered if he was hungry, and tried to remember how many hours had passed since the last time they’d ordered in. Pizza boxes, Chinese takeout cartons, Styrofoam roti containers, grease-soaked Indian food paper bags, and plastic sushi casings had littered the room until half an hour ago, when Andre had decided he couldn’t take the sleaze any longer, dumped everything into a giant cardboard moving box, Pimp Shit IV: The Wrath of Dolomite, and left it in the hallway to fester. His latest hobby was baiting the R.A., knowing she’d sooner knock on a wasps’ nest than their door.
“Them cats who be preaching on cable access? The Twelve Lost Tribes of Israel and shit?”
“Yeah,” said Macon. “They’re the only group around who’ll just straight-up call whites ‘devils’ to their faces. I’ve seen people try to argue on the street and they’ll be like, ‘Shut up, cave bitch.’ ”
Andre weighed the suggestion for a moment, then side-nodded in disapproval. “Culpability is one thing; getting a whole crowd of white folks to stand around and listen to some fool in a turban read Bible passages that prove they’re going to hell is quite another. We don’t want a riot on our hands.”
Macon stood up, stretched, rubbed his eyes, and then collapsed into a beanbag. The past few days had been like a fucked-up, never-ending game of musical chairs, with more seats than players. “No comment,” he said, yawning. As Friday approached, Macon had to fight the growing urge to do nothing, to let the Day of Apology float past him and be whatever it was destined to be: hand-holding and kumbayah, fire and brimstone, whatever. He felt helpless to shape it, clueless about what it should look like, and increasingly glib about the whole matter. He wished someone would slap him out of these bouts of rubbery apathy.
Andre rustled a copy of The New York Times. “According to the latest poll, sixty-five percent of blacks like the idea all right in theory. But it’s mostly church folks who answer these things. In reality, I’m guessing black people will find the whole shit mildly to incredibly annoying, paternalistic, insincere, and offensive. But there’s so many x-factors. What are crackers gonna say? ‘I’m sorry for the crimes my people have committed’? ‘Sorry I’m racist’? ‘Sorry about slavery, segregation, church burnings, glass ceilings, Jim Crow, and stealing rock ’n’ roll’? What?”
Macon sighed, switched to a desk chair, and tipped back on two legs. “I have no idea.”
Andre dropped his arms and the pretense that he was working and looked straight at Macon. “What do you want them to say, dude?”
“Anything. Just as long as they acknowledge something.”
“For all we know, folks might get on some personal confession shit. ‘Sorry I called this guy a nigger in a bar fight.’ ‘Sorry I vote Republican and don’t give a shit about hiring practices.’ Some ol’ feel-good, confess-and-be-forgiven, love-your-fucked-up-inner-honky shit.”
“Mmm,” said Macon, vacant. His hand twitched, wanting Fleet’s book. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”
Logan threw her magazine aside. “That isn’t good enough. You think when they asked Oppenheimer what the bomb was gonna do, he was like, ‘I guess we’ll have to wait and see’?”
“He knew the ingredients,” retorted Macon, leaning forward to stare at her. “We don’t know shit. And there’s no need to gang up on me,” he added.
Great, thought Andre, shutdown mode. Neither he nor Logan quite knew how to push Macon past it, or what would happen if they tried. Silently, they agreed to let The Franchise slide, and wished that Nique was there.
Macon sprung to his feet, climbed onto the bed, then walked over to the radiator and scaled that, too, stood atop it with his head brushing the ceiling. “You know what we need around here?” he asked. “One of those Magical Negroes, like in the movies. You know, the black person who’s some kind of mystical guide or font of down-home soulfulness or whatever for the white man? I want one of those. Can’t you be the Magical Negro, dude?”
“I can be the Smack the Taste Out Your Mouth Negro, if you like. Get down from there. Go take another walk or something. You’re driving me crazy.”
“That’s how you talk to the—what did they call me on MTV News tonight? That’s how you talk to the Rap Generation’s Answer to Robin Hood?”
Andre palmed his head, isolated a lock, and began twisting it to tightness with both hands. “I’ma say this one more time,” he told Macon. “If you keep quoting your own press, I’m finding a new roommate.” He snorted. “Robin Hood. What a crock of shit. That money went straight from their pockets to yours.”
Macon stepped down to the bed and began trampolining. The box springs heaved a tired warning. It went unheeded. “Suddenly you have a problem with that?” he asked as he bounced.
Andre shook his head without looking up, still engaged in follicle maintenance. “Not at all. What I have a problem with is the suggestion that a middle-class white dude stealing from other middle-class white dudes is somehow redistributing the wealth.”
“I would argue,” said Macon, stepping back onto the floor, “that the act of robbing those fuckers was, in itself, a revolutionary move.”
“I’m sure you would,” said Andre. “And I’m sure that if we hadn’t blown the cake on bail, you would have used it to start a free breakfast program for underprivileged kids in Harlem, too.”
“Why are you tripping? All I said was—”
“All right,” said Logan, “all right. Enough already. We’ve been cooped up in here for way too long, we’re tense, we’re out of weed, we smell bad, and we need to chill. If we’re gonna talk about something, how about Macon’s opening speech, or transportation to the rally?”
“At leas
t robbing people takes some balls,” said Macon. “What did you ever do, Dre?”
“Yeah,” said Andre, “you’re right, Macon—you’re a real hero. I wish I was so brave. Maybe then I wouldn’t bother to think about the consequences of my actions, either. I could leave that to my underlings to handle.”
“Look, I never asked for anything from you, okay? If you’re tired, jealous, fed up, whatever—fine. I understand. Just bounce. Don’t act like I’m forcing you.”
Andre threw a hand at the window. “Bounce? There’s thousands of people coming here tomorrow, Macon. I can’t just—”
“What? You can’t just what?”
Andre threw his head back in exasperation. “Aren’t you worried?”
“I’m scared shitless!” Macon spread his arms. “What do you suggest we do? Huh? Call it off?”
“There’s nothing we can do.” It was Logan. They both looked down at her. “And yelling at each other won’t help.”
Andre pointed at his roommate. “I want you to acknowledge that this is some irresponsible shit, Macon.”
“What good will that do?” He flicked his hand into the air and let it fall back to his side. “Okay. It’s some irresponsible shit. Happy?”
Andre shook his head slowly, blinked long. A sharp snort of fake laughter escaped him. “You’re a dick, dude. You know that?”
“I’ve been told.”
“You’ve been told. Great.” Andre rubbed his temples with his fingertips, bent at the waist, and winced as several vertebrae popped. “I’m fuckin’ exhausted,” he announced. “I’m going to bed.” He glanced down at Logan. “You staying?”
She stared at him, then tossed her magazine aside and stood. “Um, no. As inviting as that sounds. I should go home.” She slung her bag over her shoulder and strode to the door. “See you tomorrow.”
They watched her go in silence. Andre shuffled to his dresser, opened a drawer, and removed his toiletry kit.
“Hey, Dre. Listen.” Andre turned to find his roommate standing with his fist extended, offering a pound. “It’s just the stress. I’m sorry, man.”
Andre looked him up and down. “Save it for tomorrow,” he said, and walked into the bathroom.
Chapter Ten
The Day of Apology jumped off partly cloudy, with predicted highs at sixty-five, and Macon woke up to a bowl of Frosted Flakes and the worst headache of his life. He and Andre sat slurping sugar-tinted milk in silent solidarity, bleary-eyed and apprehensive, limbs weighty, every gesture taking on an air of ceremony. Neither one was yet ready to look outside. They’d been up for fifteen minutes when Nique burst in, beaded with sweat and already halfway through his daily pack of cigarettes at nine A.M.
“It’s cracker Halloween out there,” he said, going straight to the window. Chests pressed to the glass, Andre and Macon peered down and saw the stretch of pavement between Broadway and Amsterdam street-fair dense with rippling humanity. Macon’s heart fluttered with nervous excitement: Here it was. He imagined flinging open the window and addressing them from here. My loyal subjects . . .
“Whoa, whoa.” Nique’s voice was unnaturally high-pitched, and Macon abandoned the reverie in time to see his Minister of Information crank open the window and stick his head out.
“What the fuck is this?” Nique screamed, with so much force that the tendons in his neck strained. “What are you doing?”
A long line of blue-uniformed Columbia security guards had materialized out of nowhere, and they were marching up the middle of the block, splitting the crowd before them.
“They’re driving the cattle,” said Andre in disbelief, and sure enough the crowd was cleaving, shuffling toward the ends of the block as the guards flushed them out with gentle pressure: Sorry, but you’re breaking fire code, people, you can’t be here, move it along now, folks, you can’t stay here, come on, let’s go, ignoring the moos and lows of protest and disappointment. In less than a minute, the block was nearly empty. Only a tight central cluster of people remained, penned in by more security men.
“Why do they get to stay?” wondered Macon, squinting at the knot. “What’s so special about them?”
Nique was livid. “Columbia’s not getting away with this shit,” he vowed. “Come on, let’s get down there before they try to pull anything else.” The three of them hustled down the grime-caked stairs and surfaced on 114th Street, now cordoned off by rows of security at Broadway and Amsterdam, no coming or going. A cheer went up and the crowd of remaining white folks—fifty? seventy-five?—began chanting Macon’s name.
The cluster was mottled with kente cloth suits, dashikis and kufis, Afro wigs and scattered signs reading I’M SORRY and BLACK POWER.
“Where the fuck these people from?” asked Andre. “Andromeda?”
“Close,” said Nique. “A little place between California and New York that I like to call America.”
An adolescent kid in blackface squirmed his way through the bodies and ran up to Macon, grinning through white greasepaint lips. The Franchise gaped—What have I done?—wondered if he was looking into some kind of metaphysical fun-house mirror, this motherfucker me, this how I look, this who I am, pictured his ethos echoing through space only to be decoded wrong, misconstrued and acted on, flags stabbing up the ground in Macon’s name, am I the captain on the ship of fools? Before he could stop himself, Macon popped the kid in the nose, leaving skid marks on his paint job. The crowd gave a collective gasp. Tears sprouted from the kid’s eyes and he looked up at Macon through the wetness, hurt and confused.
“What’s the matter with you? Go clean yourself up this instant.”
“Yes, sir,” he choked, and scurried out of sight. He wasn’t more than twelve or thirteen, Macon realized: a child who’d come to the Big City all the way from West Bubblefuck, cajoled some parent into letting him take a bus or maybe snuck away, imagination stirred and heart aching, inspired and perplexed by Macon and all this justice talk. And so he fucks up, okay, he doesn’t really understand, nobody around him knows any better, nobody’s there to say, Wipe that shit off, boy, that ain’t right to be wearing, but the kid wants to be down and so he gets off the bus and finds the man himself, the guy they came to see, and he runs up expecting to be loved, embraced, he who made this daring journey, and instead the hero of the whole thing, the guy who lit up his TV and mind and got him on the bus, for whom he skipped school and convinced or defied Mom, the guy socks him in the nose like it’s nothing.
“Hey, come back,” Macon called, immediately sorry. “I didn’t mean to do that.” But the kid was gone.
“Speech! Speech!” clamored the crowd, forgiving him—ecstatic that they had been selected from amongst thousands to share this moment with Macon. New York City subway maps stuck out from their back pockets like tail feathers. Red circles marked the South Bronx, Harlem, Flatbush. Cameras and binoculars were slung around their necks; fanny packs rode the crests of their asses. Behind them, set up on the stoop of a frat house, a gaggle of TV cameras poised to capture Macon’s starter-pistol speech. Reporters mingled with the crowd, asking folks how far they’d traveled to be here today, complicit in the fiction that this horde was the entire crowd.
Macon folded his arms over his chest and stood stock-still, composing himself to speak. He wanted to set things off with a bang, but Columbia’s sabotage and the garish assemblage before him had sapped his motivational juices. The hush swelled up, electric, and Macon grimaced, swallowed, and opened his mouth.
“What’s with the costumes?” he asked weakly.
The crowd turned to one another, concerned: He doesn’t like our outfits?
“We wanted to dress black,” shouted a large, Southern-voiced woman. “Those people just have so much spirit.”
“You’re not black,” Macon informed her. The murmuring increased; Macon sensed the potential for total demoralization and quickly shifted gears, not wanting them to trudge back to the buses. Time to snatch victory from the jaws of ignorance.
“Look,
just be yourselves,” he said, walking over to a tall blond man wearing a red-black-and-green liberation jumpsuit, removing his leather Africa cap and handing it to him. “The whole idea is to recognize who you are and take responsibility. It’s not time to start embracing our inner blackness yet, y’all. Right now it’s about atonement. You don’t have cultural permission to dress like this, you understand?”
Unease rippled through the crowd. “Are they gonna beat us up?” a panicked male voice shouted from the back. Nique and Andre slapped their foreheads with Olympic-quality synchronization.
“No,” said Macon. “No one’s gonna beat you up. Not that you don’t deserve it.” They smiled. Bunch of fucking masochists, thought Andre.
“Look, you’re here because you recognize the injustice inherent to the system, right?”
They stood silent.
“Right?” Macon repeated.
“Right,” they called back, catching on.
“You’re here to take a tiny first step in the marathon toward change,” Macon told them, starting to get into it. A King Jr. “I Have a Dream” freeze-frame stirred him, and Macon lifted his voice on some resonant vibrato baritone shit. “. . . to say, ‘I understand’ ”—drawing out the I all preacherly and hitting stand hard, then grace-note pausing midsentence and soaring back up— “ ‘that mah whiteness . . . is o-ppressive.’ You are here . . . to plant your feet and commit . . . to work . . . toward dialogue.”
“Where can we buy our T-shirts?”
“Will you sign my T-shirt?”
“Are there any sweatshirts?”
“Forget the fucking T-shirts!” Macon screamed. Andre stepped forward and touched him lightly on the forearm, rebalancing the charismatic leader with a tiny show of confidence. Macon turned and met his eyes, nodded gratefully, and inhaled deep. “This isn’t a party,” he said, trading righteous dignity for tired grade-school-teacher sternness. “It’s not a sight-seeing trip or a group tour. Do not run around trying to set the record for most apologies, people. Do not ask anyone to pose for pictures. Just split up, go about your daily business, and speak to the people you happen to come across.”
Angry Black White Boy Page 21
