Angry Black White Boy (10 page)

Chapter One

Macon walked into the Malcolm X Lounge fifteen minutes late, wild-haired and imagining slavering consequence-monsters lurking behind every corner; he had summoned them and now he waited. Forty deep, the Black Student Union held its breath for a split second, heads swinging away from the podium, over the open bags of chips and pretzels and the two-liter Coke bottles scattered on the huge mahogany tabletop like primitive settlements. Eyes abandoned the Dorito-laden plates nestled in the laps of couch dwellers and resting by floor sitters’ knees to check out the pink-skinned whiteboy lingering by the door, glistening with who-knew-what—exhaustion, embarrassment, fear? They waited a moment, expecting him to mumble an apology—
Whoops, sorry, wrong
room
—and duck his ass into the hall. Instead, Macon’s eyes lit up and he beelined it to the refreshment table, poured himself a Sprite, and chugged it. “That’s the dude was fucking with Professor Alam,” somebody whispered.

Amy Green pursed her lips and squeezed the sides of the press-board podium with both hands. Like everything else in the recently reappointed and redecorated former Richard Wagner Lounge, it was secondhand and battered. After years of organizational homelessness, the BSU had persuaded Columbia to give them a space by threatening to send letters to black alumni that began
Dear
Brother/Sister, How ghetto is Columbia’s Black Student Union?
When we want to meet, we gotta check the weather forecast.
The Malcolm X Lounge was a converted music-practice room, stripped of its piano but not its soundproofing. A papier-mâché Malcolm with a papier-mâché shotgun had guarded the window in the BSU’s first year of occupancy, but the university objected to the depiction of a weapon and so some comedian had switched the shotgun for a mop. The selection of a new prop was now a yearly BSU tradition; Malcolm had held a farmer’s hoe, a three-foot bong, a dented saxophone.

Now he stood empty-handed and Amy glanced from him to Macon, who was guzzling a second soda, and wished X still had his gat. This distraction was not on her mimeographed meeting agenda, and there were two things you didn’t fuck with Amy Green on. You didn’t challenge her assertion that her glossy mane was natural, not a weave, and you didn’t slow up her tightly run meetings with bullshit. Amy was the BSU’s returning president and the auteur of Booty Madness II, a dance in the student center that had attracted more than three hundred brothers and sisters from schools throughout the five boroughs and featured an open bar, the renown DJ Bubble Lex on the ones and twos, and a special midnight performance of “It Takes Two” by Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock, whom Amy had talked into playing for free as a way to rejuvenate their careers and perhaps bag some college chicks. You didn’t want to get on her bad side.

Andre was cooling a few feet away with two other dudes from Carman eleven, and Macon joined them and gave his roommate a pound. Andre accepted it reluctantly, figuring that if Macon could ignore the who’s-the-whiteboy? glances bouncing off him from around the room, then he could handle being the dude the whiteboy knew. He had always been the dude the whiteboys knew; at least in this room the whiteboy was the minority. But Macon liked it that way. Whiteboy wins again.

“Our next order of business,” Amy clarioned, back in command, “is to decide what speakers we want for Black History Month and how much of the budget we’re willing to spend.” She lifted a sheet of paper and tucked a ribbon of hair behind her ear. “Suggestions so far are Henry Louis Gates . . .”

“Boring,” muttered Macon, too loud to be accidentally too loud. His jaw hummed with expectation, his head swam with martyrdom, his stomach churned with terror. Andre’s shoulders tensed, and instinct told him to put some physical space between himself and his roommate before Macon hit the red.

Amy double-pumped dramatic eyelashes she swore were God-given, then fixed Macon with a hair-trigger stare: the first time in the organization’s history she’d ever encouraged the population to take its eyes off her. Macon, indifferent to the second round of looks, plucked a Dorito from Andre’s plate, devoured it loudly, and smeared powdered cheese onto his jeans. He was blacker than each and every last one of these bourgeois motherfuckers.

“. . . Angela Davis . . .”

“Irrelevant,” said Macon, not quite under his breath.

“. . . Pam Grier, Chuck D, Toni Morrison . . .”

“Sagging, finished, Oprahfied.”

Andre handed him the plate and edged away. Amy pinned her list against the podium with five hard fingertips and pointed her fresh manicure at Macon.

“You have a suggestion, brother?” she asked, jutting her chin at him on
brother
in case he didn’t get the message.

“I do.” His Adam’s apple bobbed like a buoy, and he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “I don’t want to intrude, though. If y’all want me to leave, I will.” The humble request for an invitation was always a respect-getter, a perfect way to carve out space for himself where none existed. Not that it mattered.

Murmurs spread across the room, and Macon found himself remembering a play his class had done in grade school and how when it came time for the background-chatter scene, where all the villagers turn to one another and begin gossiping in hushed, excited tones, Mrs. Davis had told half the cast to repeat
watermelon
and the other half
Columbus,
and that was the secret. Macon darted his eyes around the room, lip reading, ignoring looks both curious and hostile, convinced that folks were manufacturing a fake Columbus-watermelon murmur, that all this was a game, that their agenda sheets were scripts outlining some elaborate plot against him.

“Go ’head, man, say what you got to say,” some dude shouted from the floor. Macon snapped back.

“My suggestion,” he said, balancing his plate on the arm of a couch so he could gesture more expansively, “would be not to hire a speaker at all. Put the money toward something that would actually benefit the community. Buy a gun and kill a cop, for instance.”

The scattered laughter gave Macon a boost he didn’t need and barely wanted. Who cared what these kids thought of him? Macon was on the front lines, way the fuck up in the mix, and they were hibernating in their dorm rooms. Holding meetings. Please.

“There’s too much going on out here to be worrying about some bullshit Black History shortest-month-of-the-year gig,” he went on. “You know what Rosa Parks would tell you if you hired her to speak? You know what Frederick Douglass or Fred Hampton or Ida Wells would say?” Andre raised a quiet eyebrow and matched it with a lip corner, amused and disgusted at the prospect of hearing what words of wisdom Frederick Douglass might utter through the worldly portal of Macon’s mouth.

“They’d tell you to get ready for battle, because you’re inside the belly of the beast right now,” Macon revealed. “They’d ask if you were ready to die for the cause. Whether you were learning to speak truth to power and how you planned on preventing yourselves from being co-opted by the system you’re becoming more a part of every day you’re here.”

He cut himself off, electric with energy but wanting to keep it short and sweet. At the podium, Amy stood silent, charm-school erect, maintaining regality, scanning her equally hushed subjects. A low, approving buzz, it seemed to Macon, was snaking through the crowd. Watermelon! Columbus!

Finally, a hand rose, and Amy recognized the next speaker, a lanky cat in warmup pants who sat wedged against the back radiator.

“Yes. Charles.”

“How ’bout Tyra Banks?”

Before any debate on Tyra’s merits as Black History Month speaker could ensue, before Macon’s speech could be castigated, lauded, or further ignored, before Amy Green could suggest the formation of an event-planning subcommittee or anybody could remember to ask what was up with ethnic studies, Officers Dick Downing and Ray McGrath of the New York Police Department strolled into the room and asked if a Macon Detornay was present and then if Mr. Detornay could step into the hallway please.

“Yes?” said Macon once they were outside. He felt the eyes of the BSU on him from behind the door. “Can I help you?”

“Mr. Detornay, you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Please place your hands behind your back.”

“No, really,” said Macon, obeying and feeling cold steel encircle his wrists and clamp shut. It felt more or less as he’d imagined. “I swear, I was invited to the meeting.”

They ushered him out of the building and across the campus, past the stares of hundreds of his colleagues. Fleetingly, Macon hoped he’d pass a tour group of prospective students and their parents so he could bare his teeth and snarl something about the wonders of the Columbia experience at them, but no such luck. He felt neither surprised nor worried, but oddly numb. This seemed somehow more silly than threatening, an overwhelmingly incongruous result of what he’d done. The sheen of invincibility with which the robberies had coated Macon didn’t peel away so easily; even as he marched past his dorm in shackles, he couldn’t manage to rouse panic.

Instead, Macon occupied himself by emulating the stoic annoyance he’d admired on the telegenic mugs of apprehended gangsters: arrest as routine inconvenience, minor hassle. Macon had never been inside a cell and he had no idea what to expect, but he soothed himself by running down his privilege profile: white, collegiate, middle-class. It was poor, black, publicly defended cats who went to jail, did time, rejoined society disenfranchised, couldn’t find work, went back, kept prisons growing faster than any other industry in America, kept America’s incarceration rate the highest in the world.

The cops stuffed Macon, not ungently, into the backseat of a squad car parked on 114th Street. As they were pulling out, Andre ran up to the window. Roommate loyalty had kicked in about fifty seconds after Macon’s departure.

“Where you taking him?” he asked.

“Twenny-sixth precinct.” Andre straightened and watched the car go, tapping his fist to his heart, and Macon twisted and stared back. Carman Hall shrunk behind him, higher and higher stories visible in the rear window-frame until the whole squat monster fit. As they turned uptown on Amsterdam and the school disappeared, an icicle of fear shanked Macon: short, shallow jabs to the chest and arms, the neck. It wasn’t fear of the future. Not yet. Just the present.

“Detornay,” mused Officer Downing from the passenger seat. “Whatchu suppose that is, Ray? French?”

“Sounds like it could be either French or possibly Italian, depending how it’s spelled.” The ride was smooth. Perfect shocks, superior alignment.

“Sure doesn’t sound like any African-American name I’ve ever heard though. Huh, Ray?”

“No, sir, it does not particularly.”

Downing slid open the partition separating front seat from back and threw his beefy freckled arms over the wall so he was leaning right in Macon’s face. He held his nightstick in his hand. “You sure had us fooled, buddy,” he said. McGrath made another left and they crawled west down 126th Street, through an auto-body district abandoned for the night. A small, cold bead of sweat rolled down the inside of Macon’s arm, sickeningly slow. A melted icicle.

Downing broke into a smile. “You look nervous, buddy,” he said, swinging the club loosely by its strap. “Relax.” He raised his voice to address his partner. “I think Mr. Detornay here’s seen too many cop shows, Ray.”

McGrath steered the car down the deserted street at six miles an hour, one finger on the wheel. “He’s waiting for you to hit him, Dick. That’s how us pigs are known to treat young radicals. Right, Macon?” McGrath chuckled. “You might disappoint him if you don’t take a poke. Bruise the kid’s self-esteem.”

Downing smiled, as if to say
never mind my partner.
“Can I ask you a question?”

Macon clenched his jaw. Fuck this cat-and-mouse shit, he thought, watching the gray street slide by. Let’s cut to the chase.

“I’m not saying shit—”

“—without my lawyer,” both officers chimed in. Downing conducted the three-man chorus with his billy club.

“Sure, Macon, I understand that. I was just hoping you could shed some light on, you know, some of the issues of the day. Seeing as how you sympathize so strongly with the African-American community and all.”

Macon waited for the punchline, the bait-and-switch, the bad-cop rejoinder. But Downing just stared at him, clear-eyed and waiting. There was a shade of the familiar in the cop’s demeanor, and Macon’s sense of recognition only scared him more. He rifled urgently through his mind, desperate to identify Downing’s tone in time to guess where it was going and dodge the blow to come. The nightstick dangled inches from Macon’s chest, swaying like a pendulum. McGrath wheeled the car into a broad U-turn and crept back up the block slower than ever.

“What can I do for you?” asked Macon warily.

Downing chewed his lower lip for a moment. “I’m in Harlem every day,” he said. “And it seems to me that there’s a lot of anger there. The black—the African-American community is just very . . . angry. Would you say that’s right, Macon?”

So. Downing was
that
guy: the interested observer, the fellow spy. How many of them had sidled up to Macon over the years, at parties he’d attended with his parents, eager to swap and hoping to learn? The dirty little secret they shared with him served as sufficent introduction: mutual fascination with the coloreds. It was pure plantation instinct, wrapped in a cloak of earnest anthropological befuddlement: a desire to monitor the levels of rage out in the slave shacks, cock back the rifles at the first sign of trouble.

“Why don’t you ask them?” Macon answered, trying to keep any hint of attitude out of his voice.

The left side of Downing’s face twitched and settled. “Yeah, right,” he said.

“ ‘Five-oh, nigga, run,’ ” McGrath mimicked, cupping a hand to his mouth.

“Exactly,” said Downing. “That’s all we get. So I’m asking you, Macon. You’re a real nigga, right? You get mad love in the hood.”