White Girls (19 page)
But by 1943, Detroit’s 200,000 black residents had been crammed into sixty square blocks in the city’s East End. There, they lived in deplorable filth. The black scourge threatened to spill over into the city’s white, moneyed community. White politicians, hoping to keep them out, used dubious legal means to protect “their” community. They developed new city ordinances. They developed arbitrary county lines. They also built, along Eight Mile Road, where blacks lived in close proximity to whites, a wall six feet high and one foot thick. Civil liberties at a dead end.
To insist that the black underclass lives in the urban equivalent of slave quarters implied a return to the old order: slaves over there,
masters over here. Among blacks, this attitude generated rage and a need for destruction. The race riots in the summer of 1943 were an outgrowth of a number of these long-festering indignities. By the summer of 1943, “Liberty and justice for all” had become, for black Detroit, something of a joke. Liberty for whom? Justice from what? By the nineteen fifties, 23 percent of the city’s white citizens had moved to the suburbs. The industries that sprang up during World War II no longer needed as many workers because production had slowed since the end of World War II. Automobiles were being manufactured, but there was an excess of manpower.
In 1967, rioting again broke out in the city. By then, urban planners had added “progress” to their list of affronts against blacks. Paradise Valley, a black community also known as “Black Bottom,” had been razed prior to the riots to make way for Interstate 75, another road out of the city for those, white or black, who could manage it.
In the meantime, there was violence and dancing in the streets. Bricks were thrown through shop windows, arrests were made, blood was shed, and young black men were stopped by cops who, if they didn’t like their looks or what their looks projected—fear, resentment, disgust—rearranged their young faces with billy clubs, and maybe a little stinging spittle on the lips and eyelids.
While Mrs. Mathers-Briggs was subjecting her husband by birth to her various psychological illnesses and heartbreaks, Mathers was reading the dictionary with the TV on, looking for words to describe his world, where blacks and whites had nowhere to go but their respective trailers, and nothing to imagine but their segregated poverty. How had things come to this? Did blacks and whites not have the same
aspirations when the war presented all the able-bodied poor with new economic possibilities? Perhaps the dream was not the same after all. Perhaps, on the road north, white workers who had also come up from the South dreamt of no longer being part of the permanent underclass, and therefore not so closely identified with niggers. Perhaps, on the road north, black workers dreamed that city life would be the great equalizer, and that skin color would no longer matter.
As it turned out, upper- and middle-class whites—that is, white-collar workers—didn’t much identify with blacks or poor whites. By the nineteen fifties, it had become clear that white manual laborers could only hold on to the dream of whiteness by living among their own kind. In “If I Had,” one of the fifteen tracks on his 1999 album,
The Slim Shady LP
, Mathers writes from the perspective of the dude with the Confederate flag tied around his head, dreaming of restitution. “I’m tired of being white trash, broke and always poor,” Marshall says. “Tired of taking pop bottles back to the party store. / I’m tired of not having a phone, / tired of not having a home to have one in if I did have it on. / Tired of not driving a BM, / tired of not working at GM.”
Mathers’s elders could not keep blackness away from their children, who had to attend the city’s public schools, which were predominantly black. There, Marshall found his voice—in black music. He also ran up against race hatred.
When he was nine years old, a black classmate attacked Mathers a number of times—at recess, in the school bathroom. Once, the same bully knocked his skinny white victim down with a heavy snowball; Mathers sustained severe head injuries. Subsequently, Mathers’s mother filed a claim against the school, saying the attacks had also
caused her son to have debilitating headaches, intermittent loss of vision and hearing, nightmares, nausea, and a tendency toward antisocial behavior. The lawsuit was dismissed in 1983, when a Macon County judge in Michigan declared that public schools were immune when it came to such lawsuits.
Mrs. Mathers-Briggs’s failed litigation must have felt like a failure of language. Unlike her son, she never learned to control it. How could she not bend the law to her will? Her hysteria, telling tales about her victimhood, had worked on Marshall, making other kinds of knots in his head. Why should the courts be any different? (Her tendency to treat the wrongs that had been inflicted on her son and thus herself as an occasion for a public airing was not restricted to Mathers’s defense. Indeed, after her son’s second album came out, his mother sued him for defamation of character.)
Mrs. Mathers-Briggs had a penchant for showing off the knocks and bruises incurred by living. Just like an American. Mathers’s inheritance was the Mrs. Mathers-Briggs show. He brought it with him when he left her to marry his audience. But he refined her hysteria, controlled it, gave it a linguistic form. By becoming an artist, he served and separated from Mother. He served her divorce papers by making records where he talked about their marriage. And then he married her again by talking about her again. But a mom that is your Mrs. can never forgive you for believing you are someone different, and not herself. That separateness belies her existence.
That the slings and arrows of Mathers’s outrageous misfortune in and out of school, in the outside of Detroit’s black world, did not deter him from falling increasingly in love with black music is a testament
to his interest in and commitment to exploring difference—his and theirs. Unlike many of the whites he grew up with, Mathers never claimed whiteness and its privileges as his birthright because he didn’t feel white and privileged. Being emotionally beaten up at home, having his ass kicked at school, slinging hash in a number of fast-food joints after he quit school in the ninth grade, all contributed to Mathers’s sense that he was about as welcome in the world as any black man. And rap’s dissonant sound was the soundtrack to all that. The music’s form—with its barrage of words and double entendres, shouting and silence, conversation and singing—was as familiar and natural to the burgeoning artist as the short story form was to Flannery O’Connor.
That Mathers should be open to a musical culture not his own is interesting. For some artists—white as well as black—there is the sense that delving into “otherness” allows them to articulate their own feelings of difference more readily. One thinks of the white, French-born photographer and art director Jean-Paul Goude and his 1981 masterwork,
Jungle Fever
. The book is a visual diary of Goude’s fascination with and exploration of the world of colored women—black American, Puerto Rican, Tunisian—and their erotic pull on Goude’s imagination.
Jungle Fever
is as emotionally explicit as Mathers’s lyrics. The sound of blackness—rap, soul, funk—freed Mathers to feel articulate and alive to his white pain: black music allowed him to be present as an artist, and to tell the world who he was since he was a translator in a lexicon he could never make his own: he was white. And that was his freedom.
To say, as many critics have, that whites steal from blacks who originate important work in music or fashion is beside the point.
Black American style has had a prevailing influence on the way Americans dress and create music for decades now, long before Black Panther wives were covered in
Vogue
. What makes Mathers particularly annoying to his detractors is his brave acknowledgment of how whiteness sells blackness in America, not just as a style, but as a feeling, which Mathers—along with most black artists—knows is not divisible. In “White America,” which appears on
The Eminem Show
, Mathers says:
Look at these eyes, baby blue, baby just like yourself, if they were brown, Shady lose, Shade sits on the shelf, but Shady’s cute, Shady knew, Shady’s dimples would help, make ladies swoon baby, ooh baby, look at my sales, let’s do the math, if I was black, I would’ve sold half.
Of course, part of Mathers’s genius lies in his ability to market his story to the white counterculture. He knew he wasn’t the only wigger out there. From the beginning, he wrote for the white counterculture as much as he produced music that blacks could identify with. This bears some resemblance to Sly Stone’s marketing technique in the early nineteen seventies. Sly produced funk, but his lyrics were all about love, peace, and understanding. He made black dance music for white hippies.
Nowhere in his music does Mathers ever claim he wants to be black, like some sad, inner-city Elvis. Critics who assume he does are missing the point, along with so much else. In the superficial writing
that has grown up around his white hair and white T-shirt, the pathos at the heart of his lyrics is gilded over if not missed altogether. His “rage” is that of the disillusioned romantic. Mathers can’t quite believe the world is the world. Nor can he believe there’s not enough love in it—especially for him. He writes with the hyperrealistic vividness of the romantic who can recall every slight, real or imagined. On “Kim,” a song about his estranged wife that appears on
The Marshall Mathers LP
, Mathers sends this letter from home:
How could you?
Just leave me and love him out of the blue
Oh, what’s the matter, Kim?
Am I too loud for you?
Too bad, bitch, you’re gonna finally hear me out this time
At first, I’m like all right
You wanna throw me out? That’s fine!
But not for him to take my place, are you out of your mind?
This couch, this TV, this whole house is mine!
How could you let him sleep in our bed?
Look at Kim
Look at your husband now!
The operative word here is “look.” Given Mathers’s background, where all eyes were turned on Mom as she made scenes, could Mathers feel he was real? That he existed? Moms and bullies sucked all the air out of the room. In order to be heard, he did what born writers do: he learned to listen—to himself, and to others, to stories. And like
most born performers, he longed for his work to be seen. As a teenager in Detroit, he began rapping on the underground music scene, where he made a name for himself. He released an album, but it didn’t do much. He was given a second chance at fame when the music producer and rapper Dr. Dre got a hold of the disc, liked the lyrics, and commissioned Mathers to record something else. He was given the money and time to fine-tune his sense of difference through the hard work of making words carry meaning in a country where intellection is viewed with suspicion. Yet instead of looking at Mathers’s words—the core of his art—which would generate analysis, discourse, a complicated response, his gang looks at his public persona, which is relatively simple. He’s the rude American boy with a class chip on his shoulder. But what does that boy see, feel, think? Why the anger over how humanity has fucked up the Garden of Eden, a place that is nothing if not a metaphor for love? Love of man for woman, black for white, all the things Mathers feels he has seen too little of?
Instead he looks for love in the music. As one of the producers behind the popular black rapper 50 Cent, Mathers gets to mentor blackness. A movie could be made of all this. Sam Peckinpah, the master of blood and grit and male vanity, could direct this flick. We open on Mathers as a boy; he looks up, adoringly, at his mother, as she looks intently but blindly at herself. He’s sitting near her feet as he sings a song—not one of his own, he’s too little to imagine writing one. Perhaps a song from Lee Breuer’s brilliant stage play
Gospel at Colonus
, where five blind black men sang Mathers’s autobiography first: “Who is this man? What is his name? Where does he come from? What is his race?”
1.
THE FEMALE ELDERS
tell us what to look out for. Staring straight ahead, they usher us past the Starlite Lounge, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, and whisk us across the street as soon as they see “one of them faggots” emerge from the neon-lit bar. This one—he’s brown-skinned, like nearly everyone else in that neighborhood, and skinny—has a female friend in tow, for appearances must be kept up. And as the couple runs off in search of another pack of cigarettes, the bar’s door closes slowly behind them, but not before we children hear, above the martini-fed laughter, a single voice, high and plaintive: Michael Jackson’s.
It’s 1972, and “Ben,” the fourteen-year-old star’s first solo hit, is everywhere. The title song for a film about a bullied boy and his love for a rat named Ben (together they train a legion of other rodents to kill the boy’s tormentors; eventually Ben helps kill his human companion), the mournful ballad quickly became Jackson’s early
signature song—certainly among the queens at the Starlite, who ignore its Gothic context and play it over and over again as a kind of anthem of queer longing. For it was evident by then that Michael Jackson was no mere child with a gift. Or, to put it more accurately, he was all child—an Ariel of the ghetto—whose appeal, certainly to the habitués of places like the Starlite, lay partly in his ability to find metaphors to speak about his difference, and theirs.
2.
The Jackson 5 were America’s first internationally recognized black adolescent boy band. They were as smooth as the Ink Spots, but there was a hint of wildness and pathos in Michael Jackson’s rough-boy soprano, which, with its Jackie Wilson– and James Brown–influenced yelps, managed to remain just this side of threatening. He never changed that potent formula, not even after he went solo, more or less permanently, in 1978 at the age of twenty. Early on he recognized the power mainstream stardom held—a chance to defend himself and his mother from the violent ministrations of his father, Joe Jackson (who famously has justified his tough parenting, his whippings, as a catalyst for his children’s success), and to wrest from the world what most performers seek: a nonfractured mirroring.
