Your Face in Mine (6 page)

If people wanted to use the
existing
housing stock, and not knock everything down and build another ridiculous condo, or fill in the harbor so they can get a better view of the Domino’s sign—

If we had a taxable tax base, and not fifty percent of cash flow in the city in the underground economy—

If the government actually
gave
a shit, instead of just putting up Empowerment Zone this and School of Excellence that—

Well, I guess that about sums it up, Marshall says. Y’all can go home now. I’ll just sit down and make sure Kelly here gets all that down on paper. Ninety-five theses on the future of Baltimore.

That’s just boring as shit. No way
The
New Yorker
’s
going to print that. Am I right?

I don’t know what they’ll print, I say. I’ll just write what I hear, and they can sort it out, one way or another.

That’s a polite answer, Marshall says, but not a very convincing one. You’re saying you don’t have a slant?

Not this early in the game.

Well, you must have pitched them something.

I wanted to write about black entrepreneurs, I say, because most people don’t know they exist. The culture doesn’t seem to allow for them.

Which culture do you mean?

Mainstream culture.

Right, but that’s a tricky concept, isn’t it? Because you’re not just talking about numbers. Believe me. The numbers are on
my
side. People watch sports, the local news, maybe some talk radio, Rush, Howard Stern—

Tom Joyner, Paul says.

—but that’s not what you’re talking about. Even if you’re being as broad as possible, you’re still talking about the thinking person’s news.

What you saying, Lee says, cracking a smile, black people don’t
think
?

You’re talking about a minority to begin with, Paul continues, the people who think
anything
about
black entrepreneurs
, who even know for sure what the word
entrepreneurs
means.

Yeah, Marshall says, but it’s a powerful minority.

No doubt, Paul says. And that’s what
The New Yorker
is all about. Talking to the five percent of the population that makes decisions.

My dad read
The
New Yorker
,
Lee says. Every week. Read it in the library. Then later my mom started bringing it home from one of the houses she cleaned. We had a stack of them in the bathroom. It all started with the guy who wrote about Arthur Ashe, what was his name, McPhee? My dad
loved
that book about Arthur Ashe. Even made me read it.

It’s the exception that proves the rule.

No, Marshall says, it’s not that simple, Paul. In a democracy, in an open society, anyone can have an intellectual life. We forget that. Yeah, it doesn’t show up in the Nielsen ratings. Those people don’t
do
Nielsen ratings. They’re not in the focus groups. You know, when I was a kid, when they started busing over on Greenmount, every day I was the first one at the bus stop, and this white lady bus driver—I’m talking about six-thirty in the morning—would be sitting there drinking her coffee and reading
Das Kapital
. I’m not kidding. I never forgot it.

So is that like Huey P. Newton reading
The Republic
or what? Knowledge is power? Paul chortles, leans back in his padded chair, and nods gravely as the waitress sets an egg-salad sandwich in front of him.
Listen, he says, biting the tip off his dill spear, I got a new one for you. Power is power, knowledge is, what do they call it?
Edutainment.

Tell that to the kids at Dunbar.

No, Paul says, but look, I’m serious. You can talk all you want about the intellectual life, and you’re damn right, there’s
thinking
people everywhere, in every walk, but
The New Yorker
, I mean, pick it up, it’s like reading
Playboy
for the interviews, only in reverse, because the thing about
The
New Yorker
is that the ads are the porn. You know those little tiny ads they have, like, for the desk that’s hand-carved by Shakers in Wisconsin, and costs five thousand dollars? It’s a lifestyle magazine for people who think they’re too good for a lifestyle magazine. That’s some subtle shit right there, but it’s the truth.

So what’s he supposed to do? Marshall asks. Write for
USA Today
? You think they print fifteen-thousand-word articles about the black middle class?

Kelly, Paul says, you know I’m not casting no aspersions, right? I’m just telling it like it is. We’re all in some kind of business. Shit, no, I think this article’s a great idea, it’s just, you know, don’t expect people to line up and start singing “Kumbaya.”

They’re waiting for me to say something: there’s a pocket of silence over the table, the vacuum of a conversation bubble popping, the lid lifted off a foaming pot. Martin, who’s said nothing, busies himself with dressing his chicken Caesar, adding extra pepper, flicking a stray crouton off the tablecloth.

I wish I’d brought my tape recorder, I say, lamely. This is all excellent. This is exactly what I was hoping for. An honest conversation.

Just quote me off the record, Lee says. Please. I mean it. I don’t need any more flak from Weinblatt—that’s my DA. Anyway, I’m not authorized. You’ve got to put
an official in the district attorney’s office speaking on background
. Don’t even call me an ADA, or he’ll start doing process of elimination.

Likewise for me, Paul says. I mean, you can use my name, just don’t
put ESPN in there anywhere. They’ve got special search engines that find that stuff. If my name’s next to ESPN, I’m a company spokesperson. Which would mean my ass, in this case.

You see, Kelly, Marshall says, this is what you’re going to get. No offense, people, but look at us, right, prominent pillars of the community and whatnot, and we
still
don’t want to be identified as what we are. Successful Black People. You know what my coach at City College used to say? A black man goes downtown and buys a suit at Jos. A. Bank, and you know what it comes with? A bull’s-eye on the back.

Marshall, Martin says, finally, and every head turns to look at him.
Mar
shall, he says, again, with a little dip of emphasis, let’s not do this.

Do what?

The whole victim thing.

I’m not, Marshall says. I’m making a factual observation. Read the statistics if you don’t believe me. Psychologically, black people are less likely to feel secure.
Financially
, black people are less likely to feel secure. Sociologically—

What I’m saying here is, let’s take that as understood, okay? Let’s treat that as the background. That’s what Kelly’s trying to do here.

Marshall laughs, an unexpectedly shrill, reedy laugh. I don’t know, he says, are we there yet? Can we really treat that as
back
ground? What, because of Obama?

No. Not because of Obama. Because it’s a much bigger world than it used to be. Because we have so much more
power
, globally, than we think we do.

This is what you’re going to hear from him, Lee says to me. Blackness as a brand. As a
strategy
. I think that shit is stark crazy, but what do I know? I’m just a lawyer.

Jay-Z’s doing it, Paul says. The whole global brand thing. You look at the numbers for Rocawear, sixty percent’s overseas.

Yeah, Martin says. Jay-Z, that’s one model. But it’s so much more than that.

He takes a long sip of iced tea, dabs his lips with a still-folded napkin.

So? Marshall asks.

So? You want me to give away all my trade secrets?

Don’t be paranoid, Bill Gates, Paul says. We’re not in your business.

Everyone’s going to be in my business eventually. But look, that’s beside the point. What I’m saying,
now
, is, we need more brothers looking overseas for opportunities. It’s a big world full of very small niches.

You know what he does for a living? Marshall asks me. Has he told you what he sells?

Martin exchanges a glance with me across the table.

Electronics, I say. Specialized electronics. I’m not an expert—

Oh, come on, he hasn’t given you the sales pitch yet? He sells
unlocked cell phones
. Open-platform computers. Self-replicating proxy servers. Isn’t that right? What do you call it, spyware?

Not spyware. He shrugs. Geekware, maybe. Stuff people want so that they can get around Microsoft and Verizon. I don’t even understand some of it myself. I have a technical lady out in Mountainview who handles that. Me, I just do the buying and selling. It’s low-volume, big-margin sales. My customers are the kind of rich techies who want all the latest gadgets, prototypes, the stuff you can only get over in Asia, but they want it sold to them by somebody who speaks American, who operates with a friendly face. They want to have a
guy
. A hookup. Whatever. I’m not saying it’s easy money, but it’s not exactly the salt mines, either. Eventually, when the brand’s established, I’ll sell out and move on. I’m into business, not
a
business. If I could tell one thing to the kids at Dunbar, it’s that. Capital flows.
Always be on the move.

That Zig Ziglar shit, Lee says. Always be selling. You can get it off a motivational poster.

No, Martin says, carefully, it’s not that. I’m not talking some self-esteem crap. And I’m not just talking about
money
. Success is more than money.

Power, then. Influence.

Connectedness,
he says. To be intractable. Undismissable.
Visible.

You writing this down? Paul asks me. Or do you just have one of those automatic, photographic memories?

Marshall fixes me with a newly interested look.

You know, he says to Martin, it must be nice to have a Boswell. An amanuensis. That’s seriously old school. I should look into getting one myself.

You lost me, Lee says. Ama-what?

Amanuensis,
Martin says. Someone who follows you around and writes down everything you say. I could sell you one, you know. A digital voice recorder. I’ve got one the size of a toothpick for a hundred ninety-nine.

Hear that? Marshall turns to me. You’re superannuated, he says, with shining eyes, a pretense of malice that is itself malicious. You’re fired. Go home.

I’m going to say something here that should come as no surprise, at least not to those of my generation, born after the civil rights movement had shrunk to pages 263–67 of
American Panoramas
, and raised, for the most part, in the Eighties, watching Bill Cosby sell Pudding Pops on TV: my education in blackness, in the experience of black people in America, began one hot summer afternoon in 1989, in sticky-floored Theater C at the Chestnut Hill Mall 13, with Spike Lee’s
Do the Right Thing
.

Of course I had heard rap before. I knew, in a kind of academic way, what a crack addict was, and I knew a great deal about Martin Luther King: my parents’ first date was at the March on Washington in 1963. But in the world I lived in before I moved to Baltimore—Newton, Massachusetts,
not
Boston, unless you count the occasional trip to the Aquarium or Faneuil Hall—the only black people I saw regularly were babysitters and maids. My parents were ardent Democrats, classic northeastern Waspy liberals, who nonetheless, characteristically, chose to live in a neighborhood populated with people exactly like themselves—plus a margin of Chinese, Indian, Thai, and garden-variety reform Ashkenazim—for the schools
,
the parks, the playgrounds, the excellent restaurants.

Of course it wasn’t Alabama, it wasn’t 1955; there were always a few
black kids, a photogenic sprinkling. Tiffany and Wesley Roberts, whose father was Duane Roberts, the Celtics point guard, were one year ahead of me at Passing Brook Elementary. Tiffany was grasshopper-legged, a natural sprinter, an indefatigable four-square champion; Wesley spent recesses under the pines at the far end of the soccer field, trading stickers, buttons, Garbage Pail Kids, baseball cards, Dungeons & Dragons imaginary weapons—whatever currency of the moment.

That was where I came to know him, briefly, in third grade, before his dad was traded to the SuperSonics. He sat hunched over, legs folded, stretching out the hem of his long T-shirt like a table, displaying some treasure—a folder of Reggie Jackson cards from every season, a Don Mattingly rookie card, a mint Topps pack of the 1979 Pirates—and daring the rest of us to make an offer. It wasn’t fun, exactly, being so utterly outmatched, but Wesley knew how to work the margins, trading cards he didn’t need for the best we had to offer. He stared into space, over our shoulders, reciting statistics in a listless, deadpan voice, showing why his cards were always worth more, had more long-term potential; he used words like
investment
and
dividends
. Today we might give him a diagnosis—Asperger’s, mild autism, social anxiety disorder—but no one at the time, as far as I can recall, saw anything wrong. Never did anyone in that circle refer to him as
black
. Creatures of instinct, we didn’t care about the color of his skin, or the content of his character; we cared about his stuff. Only later did it occur to me that that was why he sought us out, and perhaps why he became—I Googled him once, in idle curiosity, a few years ago—a venture capitalist seeding start-ups and then selling them to Microsoft. He’s grown into his looks now; he and his father have a foundation together that runs after-school sports programs in Seattle.

—

This was the life I was raised to have, racially speaking, the life my parents had, post-1973, when they left Back Bay for the suburbs: the life
of a Good White Person. I was meant to have a few, select, black friends—peers, confidants, individuals—a number of acquaintances, business associates, secretaries, hygienists, a few charities, to which I would give generously, as much as possible, and a broad, sympathetic, detached view of the continuing struggles of African Americans to achieve the long-delayed goals of full civic participation, low birth rates, ascension to the middle glass, hiring equity, educational parity, and so, so, so, on, on, on. I was supposed to live with the frisson of guilt that comes from owning an expensive, elaborate security system, and to mention, at parties, that rates of incarceration for black males are six times the national average. I was supposed to organize for Obama, and own at least ten separate items of Obama paraphernalia, and proudly display my
Yes We Did
postcard on my refrigerator for all of 2009 and 2010, and feel that slow-fading flush of warmth and exultation, as if someone had reached out and grasped my hand, and held it, a squeeze as a substitute for an embrace. This was the life, until a few weeks ago, that I thought I was having. I should have known better.

1989—a number, another summer—sound of the funky drummer!

What did I hear, that first time, when Donald Harrison’s rendition of “Lift Every Voice”
ended, and “Fight the Power” roared to life, in a cacophony of scratches, samples, and found noise, before that first deep bass hit, that nearly lifted me out of my chair? Something like the screeching of brakes, something like a jet plane taking off: that’s what the Bomb Squad sounded like to a fourteen-year-old in 1989, who was used to the tinny, Casio-looped beats on Eighties rap. Even before the story began, the credits were a body blow—the sheer brightness of the colors, the insistent, defiant, angry sidewalk dancing of Rosie Perez, in a pink miniskirt and tights, in shiny boxer’s trunks, bobbing and weaving. Everything that came after was a little after the fact of that first
song.
Freedom of speech is freedom of death. Elvis was a hero to most. But he never meant shit to me.

I was listening. I was paying attention.

It wasn’t long after that that the few black kids at Newton South Middle started wearing T-shirts that said
It’s a black thing—you wouldn’t understand
.
By this time I had graduated from the haze of childhood and had begun hanging out, whenever I could, in Harvard Square, and particularly at Newbury Comics, the epicenter of cool. My father was just then negotiating the terms of his new job at Black & Decker in Baltimore—he was, is, an electrical engineer, who invents power-saving devices for small appliances—and I knew my world was shifting, that Newton was already history,
over
, and I started turning my attention to magazines:
SPIN
,
Rolling Stone
,
Alternative Press
,
Maximumrocknroll
,
Vibe
,
The Source
.
And it was in
SPIN
that I read an interview with Chuck D that contained the sentence
white liberals aren’t our salvation, they’re the problem.

It had never occurred to me that I was someone else’s problem.

—

With
Do the Right Thing
came Public Enemy. After Public Enemy came N.W.A., Niggaz With Attitude. And at the same moment, the Native Tongues, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, X-Clan, Del the Funky Homosapien, The Pharcyde, Black Sheep, Arrested Development. Ice-T, Ice Cube, Onyx. In the early Nineties, hip-hop was everywhere but invisible—still controversial, still not quite accepted even as music, still hardly on the radio, and therefore an indispensable part of a teenager’s education. By the time I was sixteen I was buying bootleg tapes of every new album, $5 a pop, and I could repeat whole songs, whole sides of albums. It was the omega to punk’s alpha, the nastiness to our earnestness.
Ends justifies the means, that’s the system, so I don’t celebrate no bullshit Thanksgiving.
I listened to it hypnotically, miming the gestures in traffic
on the way to school, spraying my imaginary MAC-10 through the windshield.
We’re the number-one crew in the area, make a move for your gat and I’ll bury ya.

This shit is pathetic, my friend Ayala Kauffmann said, once, a year later, when I was giving her a ride to school. She was biracial, though it was easy to miss; with a mop of brown curls, a nose ring, and an Indian-print blouse she could have been any other Rebekah, Aviva, or Dasi. Hinjews, Mexijews, Sephardi ex-kibbutzniks—at Willow we had them all. Her father had disappeared when she was a baby, leaving nothing to her, not even his name, and her mother had remarried Ira Kauffmann, a balding, kindly Reform rabbi with fishy eyes.

I mean, she said, I get it. I get De La Soul. Everybody loves De La Soul. But this is just like looking at
Hustler
. It’s
gross
. And it’s grosser still because it’s
you
. Nobody meant this for you. Or if they did, it’s just a classic retread minstrel show.
Look at the bad black man!
You’re getting played. I can’t believe you would pay money for this shit.

I didn’t. Well, not much, anyway.

And you think that makes it okay?

Just because you’re not listening to it doesn’t mean it’s not out there, I said. Wouldn’t you rather know?

What, this is supposed to be my direct line from the ghetto?

Chuck D says hip-hop is the black world’s CNN.

You’re not the black world. You’re not
black
, don’t you get it? And listening to this shit doesn’t change that. It just makes you a parasite. It would be one thing if you actually
knew
any black people. And I don’t count.

That’s really fair. You get to be the authority, but yet you don’t count.

You don’t get to decide what’s fair, she said. Don’t you understand? She ejected the tape, before I could stop her, and flipped it into the backseat, among the Subway wrappers and 7-Eleven coffee cups, the broken microphone stand, and the guitar-string envelopes. You get to
shut up, she said. That’s your special job. You get to not have rights for a change. Shut up and go away and leave black people
alone
, for once.

—

I didn’t listen. Or maybe, in some sense, I did.

At Willow, in place of community service, we had what we called
volunteer jobs
, assigned by the principal’s office, six hours a week minimum. And the black people I knew in any true sense—any real recognition, any actual conversation—were all from my VJ shifts downtown: soup kitchen, sophomore year; food pantry, junior year; community health clinic, senior year. Mostly my supervisors were solemn, tight-mouthed men, ex-cons, Vietnam vets, halfway-house residents, who hardly bothered to learn my name; but there were always others, who asked why I wore my hair that way, who wanted to know how many hours of community service I’d been sentenced to, and what I’d done to deserve it; who offered me menthol cigarettes, which I graciously, nauseously accepted, who told me something about doing a month in the hole at Lorton, or being shot out of a helicopter in Khe Sanh.

And then there was James, a category of his own. James supervised a whole crew of prep school do-gooders—PSDGs, that was his term—at the Belinda Matthews Memorial Food Pantry on Saturday mornings, teaching us how to process a hundred pounds of cast-off lettuce, how to stack boxes of government cheese, how to load a shopping bag so it wouldn’t split. He stood a head taller than most of us, six-five, in an army jacket, with a shining bald dome, a crocheted skullcap, and a silvery soul patch, like an aging hero from a Melvin Van Peebles movie. He told us he’d been in the same City College class with Kurt Schmoke, then the mayor; after that, he’d turned down a scholarship to Howard, traveled the country playing bass in an R&B band, and spent some time with the Peoples Temple in California, years before Jonestown. But I knew, even then, he said, more than once, I knew that
Jim Jones was a crazy motherfucker. It was well
known
that he would screw anything that moved, anybody that came within ten feet. Man or woman. That was how he did it, you know. Everybody felt dirty. Everybody was compromised. Closer you get, the more compromised. So I packed my bags and got out of that scene.

And then what? Alan once asked him. We were on the same shift, in the fall of our junior year; we’d go straight from pitching rotten tomatoes to band practice. What’d you do then, after Jim Jones? How’d you get back to Baltimore?

James palmed a cantaloupe from a wax-board crate, sniffed it, like a chef looking for the peak of ripeness. Son, he said, looking straight at Alan, I did cocaine. Nothing but cocaine for fifteen years. You hear? Bought, sold, sniffed, ate, shot up, smoked, stuck it on my gums, stuck it up my ass once, I was that desperate. Took it into prison with me, took it right up to the moment I left. Fifteen years in the white mountains. Six of them in jail. Then I found God, and here we are.

I guess we should take that as a warning, Alan said.

No, James said, and he coughed, politely, to keep from laughing. I’m not here as a warning. Not to you.

He was a Muslim, though he rarely discussed it; not Nation of Islam, but NBIM, which, he told me once, stood for New Baltimore Integrated Mosque, a special congregation where Arabs and Pakistanis and black people all worshipped together. Occasionally, if I arrived early enough, I found him doing morning prayers outside in the empty lot next to the food pantry’s row house.
Inshallah,
he always said, when we talked about how many bags we’d distribute that day, and Alan and I started doing it, too, as a joke, first, and then without thinking.
Inshallah,
we could sell fifteen T-shirts.
Inshallah,
if you get into Wesleyan.

It happened to be in the same moment that I came to know James that I read
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
for the first time, and came upon the rapper Paris, who referred casually to
blue-eyed devils
and
sons of Yacub
, as if talking about his uncle Bill from Indiana. At the Black
Cat bookstore on Read Street, I found copies of
The Final Call
and the
New Afrikan Party Newsletter
, and sat reading, for an entire Sunday afternoon, one column of tiny print after another, mesmerized by explanations of how the downfall of White Amerikkka could be predicted by the phases of the sun, how school health clinics and Planned Parenthood were agents of genocide, how black people could use shea butter to boost their natural immunity to AIDS.

There was something refreshing about being called a devil. This was in 1991, at the very peak of the crack wars, when Baltimore was Murder Capital for the first time; I had just gotten my license, and I drove myself, alone, or sometimes with Alan, down to the food pantry twice or three times a week, and the fact of being independent changed everything I saw, as if I had to own the city for the first time, having to find my own parking spaces in it. It wasn’t a matter of fear, though I carried Mace with me everywhere, wore my wallet and keys on a biker chain, and checked the backseat and trunk of the car religiously, as carjackers were known to put a gun to your head from behind as you drove. What astonished me was how easily I could slip past the box hedges and pin oaks of Roland Park, the Victorians and Colonials and Tudors prim and quiet, and into the derelict corridors, the bombed-out storefronts, the vacants, the dealers in puffy jackets standing sentry on every corner, the Korean liquor stores with armored grates and triple-thick glass in front of the register. This was a drive of ten minutes. It is still, come to think of it, a drive of ten minutes. This geography, I thought, was a crime. Someone had given me a postcard of Proudhon that I taped to my locker:
Property is theft.
How could it be anything else? How could I be anything other than a criminal, by the fact of my pimply existence?