Angry Black White Boy

by Adam Mansbach

  The players’ exit opened onto empty brambling countryside; a flat half-mile separated the stadium from the train tracks. “You’d better run, Fleet,” said Buck. “They’re gonna double back here quick and we won’t be able to hold them off. You can hop a train before they catch you. Go.” The hollers of the mob grew louder, and I could see them rounding the side of the stadium as I sprinted over the cracked tundra. There were hundreds of them, a human blanket rippling behind the leadership of Anson and the Klan. They moved with steady confidence, certain I was still inside. The sight of them turned me into a black blur and I ran with a swiftnessborn of total conviction: There was no question what would happen if they caught me. I prayed for a few more seconds of invisibility, knowing they would see me any moment, spot the dust my cleats kicked up. I prayed for a train, for speed; absurdly, I even prayed for justice. And suddenly, they saw me; I heard the cry of recognition and the heavy pounding of boots as they broke into chase.

  Red Donner’s stomach plunged as he watched the mob change direction from the doorway of the stadium. He knew I was fast, but what if there wasn’t any train? What if I tripped and sprained my ankle, or leaped onto a passing car only to be ripped down from it like a piece of fruit? As I heard later from Buck Desota, Red removed his greasepaint from his satchel and scooped a heavy gob into his palm. He rubbed it all over his face, covered his hands in the bitter-smelling ointment, pulled his cap low, and turned to his teammates. “I’m blacker than Fleet Walker now,” he said. “And those sons of bitches will have to choose which one of us to chase.” Red passed the greasepaint to Joe Wagner and sprinted from the stadium, ninety degrees from the direction I had taken.

  The mob saw him and split in confusion. Red’s blackness was stark, unmistakable, unlike that of the hazy shape in the distance. Two of the front-runners switched directions to pursue him, and the mob followed. And then, like a Fourth of July celebration, a succession of black firecrackers exploded from the stadium doorwayand shot out into the Georgia sun, streaking every which way with breakneck speed. The New York Giants had become a coloredball club.

  I crossed the train tracks and kept running, and a minute later the ground rumbled. I doubled back and grabbed on to a cargo car, lifted myself and swung my frame inside, and when the train passed I was gone, nowhere to be found and never seen again in Georgia, to be sure.

  Eventually, the mob rounded all the Giants up and figured out the truth, and no one had the stomach to kill a white man, even if it was for helping the nigger Fleet Walker escape. The Giants left town bruised and badly beaten but intact, on the next train that came along.

  Except Red Donner. The mob caught him first of all and didn’t check too hard to make sure he was the man they wanted, or maybe they just didn’t care. Somebody had a knife, and plenty of others had their fists and work boots, and they stomped him to the ground and sliced him up and left him there to die, leaking blood and greasepaint into the parched Georgia soil.

  Chapter One

  All Macon needed, dipping from the city with lane-switching fervor, Jersey bound, Action News van lurching as he threaded it through traffic and hoped the TV emblems on the doors gave him carte blanche, was a plan: somewhere to go from here. Instead, his brain conjured nothing but hate mail, instant bullshit-motherfucker replays. As hard as he strained toward the future, the next half hour of his life, he couldn’t wrench a tense-shift. What is there to say? You either kill for the revolution or get killed for the revolution, and your punk double-crossing Jennifer Beals I-wanna-live-foreverass done blazed a middle coward’s path, so you best run it till your lungs ready to pop, then dig yourself a hiding hole before you get what’s coming to you from both splibs and jaspers, coons and honkies. Thought you was a hero but you chicken on a roll.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but when it came it hit him hard, and Macon hit the breaks and banged an exit-ramp right turn into the Newark Bus Terminal’s parking lot: France. Yes. Go to France. Punish myself with a smokescreen Los Angeles bus ride and then hop, skip, jump a plane to France.

  Why France?

  It’s far.

  Come on, motherfucker, you can do better than that.

  It’s far and I don’t speak French. Plus Baldwin, Hemingway, Wright, Dolphy, Dexter Gordon, Jack Johnson—

  Oh, you mean all them storied stand-tall icons you just eyeconned, hustling the world by pulling off the mask to reveal the same mug beneath, twisted sinister now—underneath the blue-eyeddevil lurks . . . a blue-eyed devil! Ha-ha, gotcha, yes I’m walking off the battlefield I plowed now, people—and the dupes scratch their decapitated heads, tucked under their arms like basketballs, and wonder, How did we not see that coming?

  Macon bought a ticket to Los Angeles on the Action News man’s Visa, swifted away from the ticket counter, and dropped the credit card into the nearest trash can. The bus was boarding. Macon found the terminal, climbed aboard the bus, and hunched against the window in a plush reclining seat. The coach’s air-conditioned cool lifted the sweat from his body like a stain in a detergent ad, and Macon crossed his arms over his chest and shivered. He had next to no money, next to no plan, no passport. He didn’t care. The gun was still on the floor of the abandoned van.

  France. Yes. Fade into the ancient walls. Maybe toothpaste-squeezemy dome for any last kindness and look up Andre’s moms and kick her some loot somehow—drop Grandma a note in the old-and-crazy home and tell her to send my college funds to Mrs. Walker, or—wait, wait, I’m slipping out of character. The new old real Macon Anson Detornay says fuck her fuck her fuck her. Shouldn’t have trusted no race-trading whiteboy stranger, Andre, especially not one who tried to wax your great-grandpops. Let the bitch remortgage.

  Hold up, hold up, he rebutted himself. Just cause you ain’ kill yourself at Nique’s dumbass request don’t make you White Devil.

  Maybe not, but fucking over black folk on a personal and epic scale and then skipping the country and consequences sure does.

  You wouldn’t say it like that if you didn’t at least care.

  I’m in transition. Give me a little time and I won’t care at all.

  Whatchu gon’ do then, nigga? Join the Klan? The NAACP? What?

  Just gonna accept who I am. Stop trying to be down. Learn not to give a fuck. Like all these other white folks out here. How hard could it be? I feel relieved already.

  You can’t unenlighten yourself.

  Watch me.

  Firm creases bracketed his mouth. The forces of good might have lost, Macon’s grillpiece said, but at least the screaming had tapered off and it was quiet. He pictured himself posed with a pitchfork and some mousy bun-haired broad, American Gothic like a motherfucker, face sallow and eyes listless. See? he’d ask the missus, staring deadpan at the camera, ain’t life grand when you shoo justice from your mind?

  The bus pulled out, and Macon glanced over his shoulder and watched as a dude several rows back conducted a brisk, quiet business selling sedatives to fellow passengers. Macon performed some mental computations—a five-nine frame divided by two bus seats measuring four-six in total length, lumpy as hell and smelling faintly of disinfectant and tobacco, their undersides barnacled with chewing gum. He multiplied the results by three thousand miles and ambled back to cop some pills.

  With the TV mascara smudged across his cheeks, Macon looked as if he had two shiners; the dealer and the rest of the seedy bus denizens avoided his eyes. His only luggage was an Action News tote bag he had found in the van and filled hastily with items that seemed potentially useful: a light green cardigan sweater, two dented microphones he figured might be worth something, a box of stale doughnuts that he’d devoured before the bus even pulled out, a blank spiral notebook, and a handful of cheap pens. Macon returned to his seat, swallowed a mysterious crimson pill dry, and picked up the notebook. He’d filled four pages when sleep lumbered up and body-slammed him: in this corner, wearing red, from out of Ancient Greece, the undefeated weightless champion, Death’s own cousin, Mr. Sandman himself
, put your hands together please for Moooorpheus! Macon passed out still clutching his pen.

  He woke up hazy and disoriented, dreams and life still vying for primacy despite the sunlight beaming through the windows. Goddamn, Macon wondered, wiping mouth-corner spittle down into his palm and squinting ahead at the indifferent double-yellow highway ribbon as he swiped his hand clean on the seat beside him, what the fuck is in those pills? He felt sedated but not rested, worn out by his nocturnal emissaries.

  The bus shouldered into a sun-baked lot, and Macon rubbed his eyes and squinted, trying to get his bearings. He’d slept clear through the night, it looked like. It appeared to be midmorning, and they were deep in the South: He knew it off the muscle though he’d never been down here before. Everything outside his window—people, buildings, cars—seemed coated with a honey glaze, a sheen of twang and drawl that slowed activity and thought down to a crawl. Evidence mingled with stereotype, and Macon infused every detail of every sight with quintessential Southern-ness. The bus shuddered to a standstill, and Macon’s gaze rolled across the businesses squatting before him, haunch to haunch: a diner, a minimart, a Wendy’s. The entire tableau struck him as almost unbearably down-homey.

  He scooped the tote bag off the floor and rooted through it, taking stock of his possessions. A black Sharpie marker was the only thing that drew his attention, so Macon palmed it, flipping it through his fingers as he watched the other passengers file off the bus in pursuit of their grease-salt-sugar fixes. How many markers just like this had he worn out in his day? Macon’s hand twitched and he took a discreet look around, popped off the marker’s top, and hunched forward to catch a tag on the seat-back before him. He pressed the felt tip to the plastic, then stiffened. The quick, efficient softie letters he’d been perfecting for the last eight years would not come. It was a part of the identity he had disowned, left smoldering a thousand miles back. Macon squinted at his canvas for a moment, then wrote CAP in precise, curvaceous script, underlined the name with one bold meniscus-stroke, and slashed quotation marks around it all. He leaned back, pleased with his handiwork, and only then did it hit him. CAP. Ain’t that a bitch. He’d just adopted the name of the most hated writer in graffiti history. CAP wasn’t just Macon’s progenitor, he was the Bronx renegade immortalized in the documentary flick Style Wars, the guy who’d pissed off every writer in the five boroughs by going over their masterpieces with his ugly-ass throw-ups. A total, classless prick. And to top it off, CAP was white.

  Macon rose to his feet, disgusted with himself, and filed off the bus. A good three-quarters of the passengers had ignored the diner and beelined it to Wendy’s, illustrating the principle on which Fast Food America was built: familiar-and-mediocre trumps unknown. The others milled about the parking lot, kicking up dust clouds that ended where their cigarette smoke began.

  Only Macon, too broke not to shoplift his breakfast, headed for the minimart. He was halfway through the door, far enough inside to hear the doorbell clang, when the row of newspaper vending machines lining the store’s outside wall caught his attention. He backtracked past the Birmingham News—aha!—to crouch before a copy of USA Today with elbows on his knees, palms sliding to a halt against his stubbled cheeks.

  NAT’L GUARD WITHDRAWS FROM NYC, the banner headline read. Beneath twin aerial photographs of a hysterical Times Square and a decimated East Harlem ran the bold-print teaser for the related story: “APOLOGY” LEADER STILL MISSING. Macon rose, enduring momentary dizziness from the quick shift in altitude, and fished enough change from his jeans to cop a paper.

  He snapped it open, rifling through the pages until he found a picture of himself standing open-mouthed before a barrage of microphones at his post-jail press conference, looking younger and stronger and unbearably cocksure. The article was essentially an interview with Nique, who was identified as the “newly appointed Chairman of Macon Detornay’s beleaguered Race Traitor Project, and its de facto spokesman.” Macon felt sorry for whatever reporter had been handed this assignment; even on the page, you could sense the incredible velocity of the bullshit shooting from Nique’s mouth, the torque spinning his words shamelessly this way and that.

  “Brother Macon has been suspended from the organization,” Nique was quoted as saying, “until such a time as he is able to resolve certain personal issues and once again provide effective leadership.”

  Macon scanned each column, reading only what lay between quotation marks. “We have not heard from him, but we do hope he will reach out to us soon so that we can help him to help himself. . . .”

  “. . . I’ll say again that the statements made during Macon’s so-called breakdown were made under extreme duress and are in no way reflective of the Race Traitor Project’s message, or even of Brother Macon’s own true sentiments. And even so, as disturbing as they were, Brother Macon’s words at that difficult juncture reflect the searing honesty—the prophetic honesty, I should say, by which I mean honesty regardless of consequence—that has always characterized his contribution to our struggle. . . .”

  The conclusion carried over to a second page: “. . . I want to stress that the Race Traitor Project is not going anywhere. We are regrouping, we are forging important ties to other organizations and individuals, and we will continue to push the envelope in the most provocative of ways. With or without Macon Detornay, you haven’t heard the last of us.”

  Macon quartered the paper, tucked it beneath his arm, and marched crisply across the lot. “I’d like to make a collect call, please,” he said into the pay phone.

  Andre picked up on the third ring. “Race Traitor Project. Please hold.” A minute later, he came back and accepted the charges.

  “Where the fuck are you?”

  Macon squinted into the sunlight. “Parking lot,” he said.

  “Fuck you want?” demanded Andre. “I don’t have a goddamn thing to say to you.” He wasn’t as angry as he sounded, Macon thought.

  “I owe you an apology.”

  “Fuck an apology. You owe me more than that.”

  “I know.” Macon sighed. “I know I do. I’ll figure something out. I swear.”

  Andre said nothing, but Macon could feel his roommate’s anger draining; some of it, anyway. The promise of restitution, even if it came to nothing, had partially un-punked Andre in his own estimation.

  “You better,” he said finally. “You fuckin’ better.” Another pause, and then, “For real, where are you?”

  “Someplace in Alabama, I think. Took a bus.”

  “Yeah, we know. The Action News guy called Visa. We kept it to ourselves.”

  “Oh. Thanks.”

  “Some things are happening,” said Andre. “We’ve been hoping you would call.”

  “Why, so you could tell me I’m suspended from my own organization?”

  “Take that up with Nique. It’s his show now, in case you couldn’t figure that out. He is the Race Traitor Project.”

  “More power to him,” said Macon. “I want nothing to do with it. My new project is learning not to give a fuck. I’m gonna retrain myself to be white.”

  “It’s not that easy, Moves.” Nique had taken the phone. His voice was clear and strident, made Macon realize how softly Andre had been speaking. “I got a lotta shit popping off, dude, and you got a lotta debts to cover. Also a lotta folks who’d love to know where they could find you, starting with New York’s Finest and the Feds. Not that I’d tell them anything, of course. Like I always said, Moves, you my nigga.”

  “Blackmail, Nique?”

  “Whitemail, dog. Not even. I’m just trying to keep you appraised of your options, since I’m the motherfucker fielding your calls— not to mention the motherfucker you left standing here with his dick in his hand. The world doesn’t stop turning because you leave town, you know.”

  Nique dropped his volume and his pitch. “Talk whatever shit you want,” he said. “I know you still want to be forgiven, Macon. I’ma tell you what it takes.”

  “Not inte
rested.”

  “Oh yeah? What would you say if I told you I’d been on the phone all night with a Dr. Conway Donner?”

  “I’d say I hope he’s an excellent shrink and that he helps you come to terms with your megalomania.”

  “He is a shrink, actually. He’s also Red Donner’s grandson. Also happens to be richer than God. Shall I go on?”

  Macon’s hand fluttered to the crown of his scalp and he scratched, violently. “Please.”

  “Con’s got a business proposal for us, Macon. He’s very eager to speak with you. All me and Andre ask is that you sit down with him. I’m not even gonna say anything else. As far as I’m concerned, you hear him out and me and you are good.” Nique grace-note paused, then swooped in for the clincher. “Plus, you know, one could argue that you owe Dr. Donner that much. I mean, there is a certain historical . . . I don’t want to call it a debt, exactly, but . . .”

  Macon exhaled, and the telephone dissected his breath into static. He could feel Nique smirking on the other end of the line, satisfied that he had played his cards right.

  “I’m two hundred miles east of nowhere, Nique,” said Macon, eager to frustrate him. “I couldn’t meet your boy if I wanted to.”

  “As luck would have it, dude, you’re in Con’s neck of the woods. He’s got offices in Mobile, Chattanooga, ATL, Jacksonville . . . all over the South, basically. He said no matter where you are, he can come and scoop you within an hour. Two, tops.”

  Macon arched his eyebrows. “It’s like that?”

  “It’s like that, Moves. So can I holler at him?”

  “Tell me what this is all about first.”

  “I couldn’t even do it justice. Con will break it down.”

  Perhaps, thought Macon, this was nothing more than a setup. He could imagine stranger scenarios than Donner simply wanting to do to an Anson what an Anson had done to a Donner. Nor was it so far-fetched to think that Nique and Andre might want to fuck him over the way he’d fucked them. Just because you’re paranoid, he told himself, doesn’t mean they’re not conspiring against you.