Losing My Cool (2 page)

It was a neighborhood of well-kept homes with yards that were flaired-up with inflatable IT'S A BOY! lawn signs, lighted holiday displays, and the occasional life-size Virgin Mary shrine. There were two main downtown areas in either direction of our house, with more pizzerias than banks or dry cleaners and, to Pappy's lament, without a single bookstore between them. Our neighbors were what my parents called “ethnic whites,” and they tended to grow up, buy homes, have children, and die within a twenty-mile radius of where they had been born—a fact that always seemed to strike Mom and Pappy as bizarre. As a family, we did not fit in with these people, who often didn't know what to make of us. Once when I was a very young boy, I was at the grocery store with my mother, misbehaving as little children do, when an older white woman walked by and said, “Ugh, it must be so tough adopting those kids from the ghetto.”

Despite my mother's being white, we were a black and not an interracial family. Both of my parents stressed this distinction and the result was that, growing up, race was not so complicated an issue in our household. My brother and I were black, period. My parents adhered to a strict and unified philosophy of race, the contents of which boil down to the following: There is no such thing as being half-white, for black, they explained, is less a biological category than a social one. It is a condition of the mind that is loosely linked to certain physical features, but more than anything it is a culture, a challenge, and a discipline. We were taught from the moment we could understand spoken words that we would be treated by whites as though we were black whether we liked it or not, and so we needed to know how to move in the world as black men. And that was that.

Questions of the soul were less clear. My mother is Protestant, the daughter of an evangelical Baptist minister. My father is what he calls a Geopolitical-Existentialist-Secularist-Humanist-Realist, which really is just his way of saying he doesn't put much stock in organized religion. Nevertheless, after very nearly being home-schooled, Clarence and I were enrolled in private Catholic schools for what my father described as “the superior levels of discipline” they offered in relation to the public schools nearby.

Another factor in the decision was the day Clarence came home from School One, about a half-block away from our front door, dazed and unable to speak. He was in the second grade and my father had given him an oxblood leather briefcase. Apparently, this made him stand out among the other boys. So did his sun-tanned skin, which after the long hot summer was the color of maple honey; and his hair, which was styled in a large spherical Afro and which in his childhood was light brown with strands of blond and something like sherry in it: beautiful. My mother and sometimes my father would comb my brother's Afro in the mornings with an orange tin can of Murray's dressing grease and a black plastic pick. “You look distinguished now, son,” Pappy would say, and smile when he was finished with him,
distinguished
being the rarest and highest compliment in his vocabulary.

Clarence was a quiet boy with thick hair, good muscle tone, and intelligent almond-shaped eyes beneath bushy brown eyebrows. That day at school a group of white children had cornered and taunted him on the yard, asking what a fucking monkey had to do with a briefcase. Either the other black students didn't see this happen or they chose not to intervene. Pappy yanked Clarence from public school the next day. By the time I was old enough, being in class with our neighbors was not even an option.

 

 

 

 

Unlike some children of mixed-race heritage, I didn't ever wish to be white. I wanted to be black. One of the first adult books my parents gave to me, around age seven, was Alex Haley's
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
. Often my mother would come into my room in the evening and discuss with me what I was reading. For several nights, I lay awake long after she had turned out the lights, haunted by the image of Malcolm's father lying prone on the railroad tracks, his body torn in two and his cranium cracked open like a coconut husk. I didn't want to resemble in any way whatsoever those men who did things like that to other men.

It was a fortunate thing for me, too, that I didn't want to be white. It was fortunate because I really didn't have much choice in the matter. My parents were right: Around white kids, I simply was not white. Whatever fantasies of passing may have threatened to steal into my mulatto psyche and wreak havoc there were dispelled early on, when Tina turned around in her chair, flipped her bronze ponytail to the side, and asked me point-blank, and audibly enough for the whole classroom to hear, “Hey, why doesn't your hair move like everyone else's?”

“It's because I'm black,” I told her, and I wasn't angry or embarrassed. It was just a fact, I felt, the way that she was husky or big-boned.

Though we didn't speak about it outright, I don't think my brother, Clarence, ever wanted to be white, either. He just didn't seem to see race everywhere around him like my parents and I did. Or if he saw it, he fled from it and didn't want to analyze it or have to spend his time unraveling it. He didn't want to be forced to make a big deal out of it. He was forgiving and trusting and found companions wherever they would be his. His two best friends were black, and he dated a quiet Asian girl for a spell during high school. Mostly, though, he fell in with a set of neighborhood white boys with lots of vowels in their surnames and little in their heads. These white boys were almost certainly the same ones who, years earlier, had demeaned my brother with racial epithets on that School One playground (the neighborhood is not that big). But Clarence never knew how to hold a grudge, and that was ages ago and these were his neighbors and they liked to do the things that he liked to do: ride bikes, ride skateboards, talk cars, smoke cigarettes, cut class, hang out. And they did take him in as one of their own, that's true, although I could see even as a child that they did so without ever fully allowing him to rest his mind, to forget that he was black and that he was somehow
other
. Still, I can't fault my brother for going the way he felt was most comfortable. He was a child of the late '70s and '80s; hip-hop hadn't completely circumscribed the world he was formed in. I was a child of the late '80s and '90s, on the other hand. I went the other route.

Not that it was always an easy route to go. It was not enough simply to know and to accept that you were black—you had to look and act that way, too.You were going to be judged by how convincingly you could pull off the pose. One day when I was around nine years old, my mother drove Clarence and me over to Unisex Hair Creationz, a black barbershop in a working-class section of Plainfield. Back then we had a metallic blue, used Mercedes-Benz sedan, which from the outside seemed in good condition, though underneath the hood it was anything but, as the countless repair bills Pappy juggled would attest. While the three of us waited for the light to change colors, I became transfixed by the jittery figure of a long, thin black woman in a stained T-shirt and sweatpants, a greasy scarf wrapped around her head. She was holding an inconsolable baby in one hand and puffing on a long cigarette with the other, stalking the second-floor balcony of a beat-up old Victorian mansion that had been converted into apartments.

I must have really been staring at her, because all of a sudden I noticed that she wasn't aimlessly pacing back and forth anymore but pointing and yelling specifically at our car. “What the fuck are you staring at?” she howled.“You rich, white motherfuckers in your Murr-say-
deez
, go the fuck home! You think you can just come and watch us like you in a goddamn zoo?”

She was making a scene. Passersby in the street were taking notice and looking at our car, too. That was a time when Benzes were the shit and you had to be careful where you parked because tough guys would pull off the little hood ornament and wear it from a chain around their necks—ready-made jewelry. I was terribly uncomfortable being the center of attention there in that backseat, mentally pleading for the light to turn green. I was also confused as hell. Who were these white people this woman kept referring to? Was she talking about . . .
us
—was she talking about
me
? Of course my mother was white, but I didn't understand how she could think
I
was white, too. After all, I was on the way that very moment to have my hair cut at the only barbershop in the area that would cut hair like mine—curly, nappy hair. The kind that “didn't move,” the kind of hair that disqualified me from getting cuts at the white barbershop two blocks from my house. But this woman
was
talking to me.

“Just ignore her,” my mother said, and finally we drove away. But I couldn't drive that woman's angry face out of my head. She had somehow stripped me of myself, taken something from me. I felt I had to protect myself from ever feeling that kind of loss again.

When I stepped into the barbershop that day and every second Saturday afterward, I was extra careful to pay attention to the other black boys sitting inside, some with their uncles, some with their fathers and brothers, some sitting all alone. These boys became like models to me. I studied their postures and their screwfaces, the unlaced purple and turquoise Filas on their feet, their mannerisms, the way they slapped hands in the street. These boys would never be singled out and dissed the way I had been. I decided I wanted whatever it was that protected them.

Inside Unisex, it smelled deliciously of witch hazel and Barbasol, and there were three long rows of cushioned seats facing five swiveling barber's chairs like bleachers in a gymnasium. There was an old, fake-wood-paneled color television suspended from the ceiling in the far back corner. If a bootlegged movie wasn't playing on the VCR, the TV stayed stuck on one channel in particular the rest of the time, a channel I soon learned was called Black Entertainment Television. At the time in the morning when I usually came into the shop, the program
Rap City
would be showing. These barbershop
Rap City
sessions were not my first exposure to hip-hop music and culture, of course; I had been aware of it vaguely through the tapes my brother brought home and played in his bedroom. I don't believe, though, that I had ever noticed BET before, and in the strange, homogeneously black setting of Unisex Hair Creationz and the city of Plainfield beyond it, the sight of this all-black cable station mesmerized and awed me.Watching BET felt cheap and even a little wrong on an intuitive level—my parents wouldn't admire most of what was shown; Pappy called it minstrelsy—but the men and women in the videos didn't just contend for my attention, they demanded it, and I obliged them. They were all so luridly sexual, so gaudily decked out, so physically confident with an oh-I-wish-a-nigga-would air of defiance, so defensively assertive, I couldn't pry my eyes away.

One morning, Ice-T's “New Jack Hustler” video came on, and though I didn't know the meaning behind the title—or even whether I liked what I was hearing—I knew for sure that the other boys in the shop didn't seem to question any of it, and I sensed that I shouldn't, either. All of them knew the words to the song and some rapped along to it convincingly. I paid attention to the slang they were using and decided I had better learn it myself.Terms like “nigga” and “bitch” were embedded in my thought process, and I was consciously aware for the first time that it wasn't enough just to know the lexicon. There was also a certain way of moving and gesticulating that went with whatever was being said, a silent body language that everybody seemed to speak and understand, whether rapping or chatting, which I would need to get down, too. Over the weeks and months that followed, as I became more and more adept at mimicking and projecting blackness the BET way, and while it was all still fresh to me, what struck me most about this new behavior was how far it veered not just from that of my white classmates and friends at Holy Trinity, but also from that of my father and the two older black barbers in the barbershop—sharp men who looked out of place in Unisex and who held the door and brushed parts on the sides of their heads.

 

 

 

 

One afternoon I came home from the barbershop sporting an aerodynamic new hair creation of my own.“What on earth did you let them do to you, son?” Pappy said as soon as he saw me. (Our house was not spacious; the front door opened directly into Pappy's study, which he had converted from what ordinarily would have been a living room. To enter the house was literally to step into his scrutinizing gaze.)

“Huh?” I said, touching my hand to my head. The top was so flat and cylindrical it resembled an unused No. 2 pencil eraser; the sides and the back were shaved all the way down, revealing a shaft of high-yellow scalp.

“What, they didn't listen when you told them what you wanted?”

“No, they did,” I said. “This is what I wanted.”

“You wanted
that
?”

“Well, yeah, it's what everyone is wearing, Babe; it's what's on BET and in all the magazines.” ( We call my father Babe when speaking to him casually, kind of a
tu
to the
vous
of Pappy.)

“And you want to look like everyone else, son? Is that what you want?” He was staring at me intently now.

I stood there before him, studying the Air Flights on my feet. I didn't have a response he would find remotely respectable. The thing is that I
did
want to look like everyone else—everyone else in the barbershop and on that TV screen. After all, even in the backseat of a big ol' Murrsaydeez, the woman on the balcony would never mistake a brother with a flattop like
this
for being white.

Annoyed or dismayed by my new coif as he was, though, Pappy allowed Clarence and me a generous amount of latitude when it came to our personal style, as long as we were giving him our best efforts in what he cared about most: the development of our minds. What this meant, giving him our best, was not that we were pressured to place first in our classes or even to get straight A's on our schoolwork, although it would have been welcome if we did. We were expected to maintain decent grades, but it was deeper than that. Pappy, no longer working as a sociologist, now put his PhD and extensive store of personal knowledge and reading to use running a private academic and SAT preparation service from our home. From the second grade on, giving Pappy our best meant we needed to try hard in school, but much more important than that, we needed to study one-on-one with him in the evenings and on the weekends, on long vacations, and all throughout the summer break. If we could not do that, he was able to make our home the most uncomfortable inn to lodge in. When Clarence began blowing off work, he didn't just get grounded, he came home to find his bedroom walls stripped bare, his Michael Jordan and Run-D.M.C. posters replaced with pastel sheets of algebra equations Pappy had printed out and tacked up.