How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(14)
They still got us, I tell myself. They still got us.
“That was so ridiculous,” Nicole’s friend keeps saying from the backseat as we head home. “That was so totally ridiculous.”
No one else is saying a word. Nicole is driving eight miles per hour below the speed limit.
As we get closer to Emmaus, Nicole’s friend starts replaying what happened from the beginning of the concert to the cops saying I threw crack out the window.
She nervously says “totally” and “ridiculous” a few more times. She never says “afraid,” “angry,” “worried,” “complicit,” “tired,” or “ashamed.”
We got out of the Geo and saw the blue flickering of the TV on the upstairs balcony of Kurt’s apartment. Kurt and his family were watching something with a loud laugh track. Our sliding glass door was covered in new muddy smudges.
I walked into the smaller bedroom of our apartment. While Nicole’s friend kept replaying what happened for the third time in the living room, I dug my feet into the carpet of the bedroom and tried to push myself through the wall.
Nicole knocked on the door.
“You OK?” she asked me.
“I’m good,” I said. “For real. You should spend some time with your friends before they leave.”
Nicole looked at me like she wanted to say everything was going to be okay. I wanted her to say that we were the collateral damage of a nation going through growing pains. Part of me wanted us to hug and agree each other to death that we were better people than we actually were. But most of me was tired of lying to myself and really tired of talking to white folks.
Nicole kept staring at me through the silence when we heard some thumping and screaming upstairs. I told her that I was sorry for being a dick, but I just wanted to read and write before going to bed.
I grabbed my notebook and told myself I was going to use that day as fuel to finish a chapter I was writing about four kids from Mississippi who time-travel through a hole in the ground. The kids think time-travel is the only way to make their state and their nation love itself and the kids coming after them. I scribbled away at a chapter before getting stuck on these two sentences one of the characters sees written in sawdust in a workshed around 1964:
We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.
We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.
We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.
We are real black characters…
After what happened that day, all that really mattered was making it to those two clunky sentences. Everything else, including Kurt’s intentions, Nicole’s nervous friend, and my shame at getting niggered by two perverted police officers, was as light as the paper airplanes I threw past Kurt’s apartment. And making it to that point, as quiet as it’s kept, felt like the most that one of my kind could ask for, especially a few minutes from some invisible crack, not that many miles from Mississippi, and directly beneath the apartment of an American white boy who needed to say “youse” and “your kind” way more than some of y’all could ever imagine.
Hip-Hop Stole My Southern Black Boy
IN 1998, I STOOD IN THE BASEMENT BATHROOM OF Mudd Library at Oberlin College and asked myself, Quick, Kie, what in the hell is a cipher? It was a question I couldn’t ask out loud, as I was speaking of the word, not Tha Cypher, a magazine that Rich Santiago, from the Bronx, and David Jacobs were creating outside the bathroom. The word “cipher,” I remembered had initially crept up on me in a much smaller Central Mississippi bathroom back in 1992.
Back then, fifteen minutes into our lunch period, seven of us descended into what we called the B-Boy bathroom. B-Boy for us meant neither Breaker Boy, Bad Boy, nor Bronx Boy; it meant Black Boy. There, B. Dazzle, who was the little brother of god-emcee Kamikaze of the group Crooked Lettaz, chaired a lyrical demolition of Stacy “King Slender” Hill.
I slouched between two urinals, hands cupped over mouth, providing a weak beat box while B. Dazzle went on and on and on… Every Black Boy in the bathroom caught a vibe from his lyrics, or at least we acted like he did, in spite of the fact that we were the Southern Niggas who needed to get wiser, and because we were the Southern Niggas who ironically felt wiser and more real just by listening to B. Dazzle. The seven of us, including the just-dissed King Slender, bobbed our heads and pumped our fists like we knew what everything in his rhyme, including his “cipher,” really meant.
You had to be a B-Boy to enter our space. No black girls, Asians, or white folks stepped foot in the B-Boy bathroom when we rocked it. In my imagination, I always see K. Parry, a gregarious, theatrical, give-peace-achance white guy trying to Rocky his way into our space with some sharp wit and dramatic vocal bombast. This large thespian wobbles into the bathroom in some stone-washed cutoffs and penny loafers. He proceeds to spit a monologue that doesn’t even rhyme before getting sliced up by the previously demolished King Slender, who says something like, “…I’m Clubber Lang, K. Parry, not Stacy the Hill/This the Nigga version of Rocky and Balboa gettin’ killed.” King Slender ends it by saying, “Live on, Apollo Creed.”