Review
"Adam Mansbach's cultishly popular novel about an "Angry Black White Boy" who ignites a nationwide race furor seemed an unlikely property for stage translation. But adaptor (as well as title-role player) Dan Wolf and collaborators have pulled it off. This very funny, frequently electric take on an outrageous story is billed as a "new play with live music" -- though it's no musical. Rather, it's hip-hop theater that seems destined for extended life. The book's careening parable feels like a more multiculturally aware equivalent to the literary provocations of older cult author Chuck Palahniuk, with its wild plot hooks, credibly eccentric characters and trenchant apocalyptic comedy.... ingenious street-dance-slash-mime stylized movement [and] occasional recorded snippets mesh with the cast's rapping, human beatboxing, singing and keyboarding -- all cleverly driving the narrative forward rather than overpowering it. Visual design contributions are sharp but minimal, as the dynamic four performers' multiple-role-playing, multidisciplinary talents supply all spectacle needed."
—Variety
"Intersection for the Arts' new play "Angry Black White Boy," based on local author Adam Mansbach's celebrated 2005 novel, blasts through what could have been a tired debate on racial identity politics. With incredible energy and seamless staging, the show has the effect of being lost in a good book, not sitting in a theater. Adapted by and starring Dan Wolf as Macon Detornay, the angry white boy in question, the show feature members of the hip-hop collective Felonious - Myers Clark, Keith Pinto (doubling as choreographer) and Tommy Shepherd (also the composer) in alternating roles. The spare set proves to be big enough for elements of dance to intertwine with dialogue. Amazingly, the sound is controlled by the performers on stage, either through live beat-box effects or recordings. The play ends amid the confusion of who, exactly, should be apologizing to whom and for what. The issues are anything but black or white".
—San Francisco Chronicle
"For all of its form crunching and boundary pushing, "Angry Black White Boy" rises or falls on the strength of its storytelling. Dan Wolf’s stage adaptation of Adam Mansbach's novel tells a fierce, funny, fascinating story that cuts to the core of what we talk about when we talk about race in this country. There’s satire and sincerity in ample supply, and this dynamic Campo Santo/Intersection for the Arts production, directed with sharp focus and experimental glee by Sean San Jose, is compelling as it is entertaining... fluid sound and movement that make the story feel like dance, poetry and music without ever detracting from the forward motion of the plot and the characters’ trajectory. The storytelling along the way crackles with energy that comes from the fusion of mostly live music – a blend of hip-hop, rap, beatbox, doo-wop, gorgeous harmonies -- and incisive movement. The excellent quartet of actors fuses sound, movement and storytelling to create a uniquely theatrical experience."
—San Francisco Examiner
"Vigorous and inviting... very entertaining. Director Sean San Jose and cast propel the action through a fluid, combustible mixture of music and movement, with sharp choreography. The cohesive, versatile ensemble and Wolf's sympathetic approach translates into an engaging theatrical hybrid, whose punctuations and rhythms carry their own share of emotional content and cultural meaning."
—San Francisco Bay Guardian
"Adapted from Adam Mansbach’s hip-lit novel of the same title, the stage version doesn’t dilute the potent conversation about race, racism, and identity. In fact, I’d venture to say witnessing the Mansbach’s deeply complicated subject matter as live dialog is possibly more powerful. Featuring members of the hip-hop collective Felonious (Myers Clark, Keith Pinto and Tommy Shepherd), it’s also very lyrical in its execution, featuring and ballet-influenced choreography and stage blocking from Keith Pinto. This is a thoughtfully complicated production. The issues are muddy, the resolutions are unclear, and the show on the whole has a great sense of humor.Wolf’s play is an amazing and consistently challenging journey through one’s psyche... an extremely nuanced play."
—SFist
“Angry Black White Boy is bananas! Actually, it’s a banana split with razor blades in it. Adam Mansbach is the white Richard Wright, and Angry Black White Boy is our generation’s Native Son.”
—William Upski Wimsatt, author of No More Prisons
“Startling, subversive, and raucous, Angry Black White Boy is a novel about how we became who we are, and why that’s not good enough.”
—Daniel Alarcón, author of War by Candlelight
“With this brutal, hilarious, and tragic novel, Adam Mansbach proves once again he is one of the most ambitious, insightful, and daring writers of our generation.”
—Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
“Angry Black White Boy is full of hilariously twisted racial politics. Adam Mansbach is like a wigger Ishmael Reed running wild through the world of hip hop.”
—Touré, author of Soul City
“An insanely smart novel that pulls no punches . . . wild, comic, and dark.”
—Percival Everett, author of Erasure
—Variety
"Intersection for the Arts' new play "Angry Black White Boy," based on local author Adam Mansbach's celebrated 2005 novel, blasts through what could have been a tired debate on racial identity politics. With incredible energy and seamless staging, the show has the effect of being lost in a good book, not sitting in a theater. Adapted by and starring Dan Wolf as Macon Detornay, the angry white boy in question, the show feature members of the hip-hop collective Felonious - Myers Clark, Keith Pinto (doubling as choreographer) and Tommy Shepherd (also the composer) in alternating roles. The spare set proves to be big enough for elements of dance to intertwine with dialogue. Amazingly, the sound is controlled by the performers on stage, either through live beat-box effects or recordings. The play ends amid the confusion of who, exactly, should be apologizing to whom and for what. The issues are anything but black or white".
—San Francisco Chronicle
"For all of its form crunching and boundary pushing, "Angry Black White Boy" rises or falls on the strength of its storytelling. Dan Wolf’s stage adaptation of Adam Mansbach's novel tells a fierce, funny, fascinating story that cuts to the core of what we talk about when we talk about race in this country. There’s satire and sincerity in ample supply, and this dynamic Campo Santo/Intersection for the Arts production, directed with sharp focus and experimental glee by Sean San Jose, is compelling as it is entertaining... fluid sound and movement that make the story feel like dance, poetry and music without ever detracting from the forward motion of the plot and the characters’ trajectory. The storytelling along the way crackles with energy that comes from the fusion of mostly live music – a blend of hip-hop, rap, beatbox, doo-wop, gorgeous harmonies -- and incisive movement. The excellent quartet of actors fuses sound, movement and storytelling to create a uniquely theatrical experience."
—San Francisco Examiner
"Vigorous and inviting... very entertaining. Director Sean San Jose and cast propel the action through a fluid, combustible mixture of music and movement, with sharp choreography. The cohesive, versatile ensemble and Wolf's sympathetic approach translates into an engaging theatrical hybrid, whose punctuations and rhythms carry their own share of emotional content and cultural meaning."
—San Francisco Bay Guardian
"Adapted from Adam Mansbach’s hip-lit novel of the same title, the stage version doesn’t dilute the potent conversation about race, racism, and identity. In fact, I’d venture to say witnessing the Mansbach’s deeply complicated subject matter as live dialog is possibly more powerful. Featuring members of the hip-hop collective Felonious (Myers Clark, Keith Pinto and Tommy Shepherd), it’s also very lyrical in its execution, featuring and ballet-influenced choreography and stage blocking from Keith Pinto. This is a thoughtfully complicated production. The issues are muddy, the resolutions are unclear, and the show on the whole has a great sense of humor.Wolf’s play is an amazing and consistently challenging journey through one’s psyche... an extremely nuanced play."
—SFist
“Angry Black White Boy is bananas! Actually, it’s a banana split with razor blades in it. Adam Mansbach is the white Richard Wright, and Angry Black White Boy is our generation’s Native Son.”
—William Upski Wimsatt, author of No More Prisons
“Startling, subversive, and raucous, Angry Black White Boy is a novel about how we became who we are, and why that’s not good enough.”
—Daniel Alarcón, author of War by Candlelight
“With this brutal, hilarious, and tragic novel, Adam Mansbach proves once again he is one of the most ambitious, insightful, and daring writers of our generation.”
—Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
“Angry Black White Boy is full of hilariously twisted racial politics. Adam Mansbach is like a wigger Ishmael Reed running wild through the world of hip hop.”
—Touré, author of Soul City
“An insanely smart novel that pulls no punches . . . wild, comic, and dark.”
—Percival Everett, author of Erasure
Book Description
From the acclaimed author of Shackling Water comes the first great race novel of the twenty-first century, an incendiary and ruthlessly funny satire about violence, pop culture, and American identity.
Macon Detornay is a suburban white boy possessed and politicized by black culture, and filled with rage toward white America. After moving to New York City for college, Macon begins robbing white passengers in his taxicab, setting off a manhunt for the black man presumed to be committing the crimes. When his true identity is revealed, Macon finds himself to be a celebrity and makes use of the spotlight to hold forth on the evils and invisibility of whiteness. Soon he launches the Race Traitor Project, a stress-addled collective that attracts guilty liberals, wannabe gangstas, and bandwagon riders from all over the country to participate in a Day of Apology—a day set aside for white people to make amends for four hundred years of oppression. The Day of Apology pushes New York City over the edge into an epic riot, forcing Macon to confront the depth of his own commitment to the struggle.
Peopled with all manner of race pimps and players, Angry Black White Boy is a stunning breakout book from a critically acclaimed young writer and should be required reading for anyone who wants to get under the skin of the complexities of identity in America.
Macon Detornay is a suburban white boy possessed and politicized by black culture, and filled with rage toward white America. After moving to New York City for college, Macon begins robbing white passengers in his taxicab, setting off a manhunt for the black man presumed to be committing the crimes. When his true identity is revealed, Macon finds himself to be a celebrity and makes use of the spotlight to hold forth on the evils and invisibility of whiteness. Soon he launches the Race Traitor Project, a stress-addled collective that attracts guilty liberals, wannabe gangstas, and bandwagon riders from all over the country to participate in a Day of Apology—a day set aside for white people to make amends for four hundred years of oppression. The Day of Apology pushes New York City over the edge into an epic riot, forcing Macon to confront the depth of his own commitment to the struggle.
Peopled with all manner of race pimps and players, Angry Black White Boy is a stunning breakout book from a critically acclaimed young writer and should be required reading for anyone who wants to get under the skin of the complexities of identity in America.
From the Back Cover
"A remarkably successful remix of the traditional race novel. Mansbach
monkey-wrenches the formula of the angry black man in the white man's world and incisively cuts to the heart of the issue of race in America today. [Angry Black White Boy] shows us where we as a culture have come from, the distance we have traveled, and how long the road ahead remains. It is first-rate satire grounded in the absurd notion that a simple 'I'm sorry' can start to make things better. The novel will make you laugh, cringe and read until the last page without knowing how it's going to end. It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate conclusion for the story of Macon Detornay, as the uncertainty of fiction dovetails with the uncertainty of reality."
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Angry Black White Boy is bananas! Actually, it’s a banana split with razor blades in it. Adam Mansbach is the white Richard Wright, and Angry Black White Boy is our generation’s Native Son.” —William Upski Wimsatt, author of No More Prisons
“Startling, subversive, and raucous, Angry Black White Boy is a novel about how we became who we are, and why that’s not good enough.” —Daniel Alarcón, author of War by Candlelight
“With this brutal, hilarious, and tragic novel, Adam Mansbach proves once again he is one of the most ambitious, insightful, and daring writers of our generation.” —Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
“Angry Black White Boy is full of hilariously twisted racial politics. Adam Mansbach is like a wigger Ishmael Reed running wild through the world of hip hop.” —Touré, author of Soul City
“An insanely smart novel that pulls no punches . . . wild, comic, and dark.” —Percival Everett, author of Erasure
monkey-wrenches the formula of the angry black man in the white man's world and incisively cuts to the heart of the issue of race in America today. [Angry Black White Boy] shows us where we as a culture have come from, the distance we have traveled, and how long the road ahead remains. It is first-rate satire grounded in the absurd notion that a simple 'I'm sorry' can start to make things better. The novel will make you laugh, cringe and read until the last page without knowing how it's going to end. It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate conclusion for the story of Macon Detornay, as the uncertainty of fiction dovetails with the uncertainty of reality."
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Angry Black White Boy is bananas! Actually, it’s a banana split with razor blades in it. Adam Mansbach is the white Richard Wright, and Angry Black White Boy is our generation’s Native Son.” —William Upski Wimsatt, author of No More Prisons
“Startling, subversive, and raucous, Angry Black White Boy is a novel about how we became who we are, and why that’s not good enough.” —Daniel Alarcón, author of War by Candlelight
“With this brutal, hilarious, and tragic novel, Adam Mansbach proves once again he is one of the most ambitious, insightful, and daring writers of our generation.” —Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
“Angry Black White Boy is full of hilariously twisted racial politics. Adam Mansbach is like a wigger Ishmael Reed running wild through the world of hip hop.” —Touré, author of Soul City
“An insanely smart novel that pulls no punches . . . wild, comic, and dark.” —Percival Everett, author of Erasure
About the Author
Adam Mansbach is the author of the novel Shackling Water and the poetry collection genius b-boy cynics getting weeded in the garden of delights.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Macon Everett Detornay fisted the wheel and swung his new yellow cab downtown. Hip hop didn’t raise no moon-eyed loverboys, and Macon would be dead before the thought of whittling down passion from a blunt lump to a harpoon, something you could aim at a person, would take shape inside him. All the things he loved were too big, comical to throw your arms around like carnival prize teddy bears: truth, revolution, huge nonexistent shit like that.
It was a little past rush hour now, and Macon flipped on his radio and relaxed as the venerable voice of Kool DJ Red Alert introduced an old-school set on Hot 97 FM, the station whose tagline, “Where hip hop lives,” had inspired more than one underground MC to declare himself dead. As the omnipotent what’s-hot-what’s-not market arbiter of the late nineties, Hot 97 had played matchmaker for hip hop and psychotic materialism, advising hip hop to stop returning phone calls from former lovers like Black Power and Social Responsibility, encouraging the couple to move in together, and finally, in an exclusive Aspen ceremony attended by three hundred CEOs and only a handful of artists and project-housing thugs, to exchange diamond-flooded Rolexes and sign the merger deal in blood. When the honeymoon waned, the station placated hip hop’s ornery elders, pissed and financially slighted, by paying periodic tribute to “the pioneers of the old school” with five-second announcements encouraging their audience of fourteen-year-old wannabe gangster macks to “know their history.”
None of which had jack to do with Red; his drive-time show remained untainted by payola, his very employment a paean to purer days. The crossfader glided clean across the mixer and into a classic, dancing New York City’s newest cabdriver straight down memory lane. “I useta roll up / this is a hold up, ain’t nothin’ funny / stop smilin’, be still / don’t nothin’ move but the money,” Rakim Allah intoned, smooth with the roughness, reflecting on the tax-free paper he had clocked before he “learned to earn / cause I’m Righteous”: before he joined the Five Percent Nation and gained Knowledge of Self and realized that the Original Asiatic Black Man was the Maker, the Owner, the Cream of the Planet Earth, Father of Civilization and God of the Universe. Before he became part of the Five Percent of the population who overstood the Supreme Mathematics and threw off the shackles of mental slavery to become Poor Righteous Teachers.
Macon knew the Five Percenters’ rules as well as any whiteboy could, first from listening to the lyrics of the Righteous and then from living at Lajuan’s crib in Jamaica Plain for the last fifteen months, where black men who called themselves Gods sat around all day with eyelids quartermasted from smoking blunts and drinking ninety-nine-cent twenty-two-ounce Ballantines, talking about women who were not called Earths, as doctrine dictated, but bitches. The apartment was a degenerate sitcom: jokes and laugh tracks, heated interlocking minutes of family therapy, “Son, son, listen” interruptions, sex convo and chess games and rhymes and rhymes and beats to the rhymes and the every-occasion, rain-sleet-or-pestilence query “Who’s going to the weedspot?”; long- ass conversations that flipped general to specific and then back again in an endless, fascinating, and pointless battle of verbs and philosophy, volume and religion, rhetoric and flowskills.
Macon had learned the most from Jihad, the big-entrance- making uninvited drop-in neighbor the audience loved: a Newport-smoking, monologue-spitting herbologist with matching Nikes for every rugby shirt he owned and a penchant for talking the esoteric God Body Science of the Five Percenters from one mouth corner and hustle-ego-watch-me as unfiltered as New York tap water out the other. Macon’s star-vehicle spin-off, cats joked, would be a show called Adopted Brother. They plotted episodes in the perennial back-alley twilight that slashed in sideways from the street lamp and gave the dust something to dance in besides the glow of the forever-on TV.
Chinese takeout boxes filled the garbage can, and a ten-pound bag of white rice lived a bachelor’s life in the one uncorroded cabinet. Cats would go to the store for hot sauce, barbecue sauce, ranch dressing, go to McDonald’s and jack three hundred little ketchup packets, whatever you could pour on rice for flavor. Only on Sunday afternoons did they sit down and really eat, and then only because when Macon moved in he’d instituted-slash-sponsored the ritual of family dinners. They’d make turkey lasagna, Jihad and Aura grating cheese into silver mixing bowls and making Sal’s Pizzeria jokes from Do the Right Thing and Macon sitting in Lajuan’s room, where he hid to do his writing, scribbling in a notebook and listening at the same time, overhearing and folding what was overheard into his thoughts like mushrooms into an omelet.
Everything was always too much in that crib; the drinks too strong, the weed too harsh, the conversation too aggressive, the chess battles waged on the bootleg coffee table too long and reckless, the music too loud. Dudes cut each other off, spoke fast and until interrupted, acted like the dilettante scientific and social analogies they constructed were the perfect tools of proof—which somehow they often were, like “Naah, son . . . SON! Do the knowledge: Boom, it’s like magnetic attraction. The gravitation doesn’t work unless the shit is mutual, so ‘love is blind’ is Now Cipher, God. It’s like how some cats say that niggas can’t be racist, you know, you know the science on that, you can’t be racist unless you have the power to be racist, so boom, you can’t say you in love unless you both in love; one person in love is like the sound of one hand clapping, God.”
Macon switched lanes without signaling, loving the order and chaos of Manhattan driving, and made an arbitrary right turn. He’d learned his way around already, before he’d even posed for his driver’s ID; it had taken him all of a week. New York was simple, a grid: choices galore, traffic laws optional. Boston, by contrast, was a lunatic maze of dead ends and one-ways, a city whose streets had evolved from cowpaths to highways with no sign of topological supervision. Macon had spent all twenty years of his life there, and even on his final day of work at the charter-car service, he’d gotten lost carting a vanful of Japanese businessmen to a suburban conference. Now exhilaration filled him and he tightened his left-handed grip on the wheel: Fuck racist-ass, provincial Boston. New York City, baby. Here at last. The center of the universe. He turned the music up, digging the unity of place and soundscape, relishing not just his understanding of each line of Rakim’s verse, but the fact that he could scarcely remember a time when he hadn’t known this shit.
With idle pride, Macon scrolled through some of what he knew. The Ten Percent were the bloodsuckers of the poor. They had Knowledge of Self but were not Righteous, and they preyed on the ignorance of the Eighty-Five who were Deaf, Dumb, and Blind to the truth. The Divine Alphabet allowed Gods and Earths to communicate in code; when Sadat X from Brand Nubian rhymed “the born cipher cipher master / makes me think much faster,” he meant the b-o-o-m, the boom, the weed. One hundred and twenty sacred Lessons awaited mastery; Jihad had sometimes disappeared behind a plywood bedroom door to study, or claim he was studying and smoke a blunt for dolo. Elijah Muhammad’s old Caucasian creation myth—the evil scientist Dr. Yacub grafts a barbaric white race from the Original Asiatic Black, a warlike people banished to the caves of cold, dark Europe but destined to rule the earth for sixty centuries—was tacitly endorsed, and white folks were called devils.
But were all white people devils? Could there be exceptions? What about that dude Paul C., who’d engineered Eric B. & Rakim’s album? What about Macon, who built with the Gods morning, noon, and night, passed out alongside them on perpendicular couches with his sneakers touching theirs, high off shared wack buddha? Macon had lost sleep looking for a loophole back in 1990, when the smoovest MC on the planet was Grand Puba Maxwell, asking “Can a Devil fool a Muslim? No, not nowadays bro,” and declaring, “It’s time to drop the bomb and make the Devil pay the piper.”
From Macon’s confusion had bubbled anger. How dare black people not see him as an ally, not recognize that he was down? He retaliated by studying their history, their culture: He was a thirteen-year-old whiteboy in a Malcolm X T-shirt, alone at the first annual Boston Hip Hop Conference, heart fluttering with intimidation and delight as scowling bald-headed old schoolers pointed at his chest, demanding, “Whatchu know about that man?” Which was exactly what he’d wanted, why he’d worn it. He ran down Malcolm’s life for them, watched them revise their expressions with inward elation, nodded studiously at their government assassination theories, rhymed when the chance presented itself. Tagged other graffiti writers’ blackbooks and wondered what it would take to be scratched from the devil list for good.
And yet history was overwhelming, and down deep Macon knew the truth. Who but white folks, his folks, had been so brutal for so long? He’d retreated briefly into his own Judaism, Jewish-not-white, with its analogous history of victimization and enslavement, but he couldn’t make it fit, couldn’t make himself feel Jewish, didn’t know what being Jewish felt like. He tossed the Star of David medallion Grandma had given him back into the dresser after a day, reflecting that race pride was a f...
Macon Everett Detornay fisted the wheel and swung his new yellow cab downtown. Hip hop didn’t raise no moon-eyed loverboys, and Macon would be dead before the thought of whittling down passion from a blunt lump to a harpoon, something you could aim at a person, would take shape inside him. All the things he loved were too big, comical to throw your arms around like carnival prize teddy bears: truth, revolution, huge nonexistent shit like that.
It was a little past rush hour now, and Macon flipped on his radio and relaxed as the venerable voice of Kool DJ Red Alert introduced an old-school set on Hot 97 FM, the station whose tagline, “Where hip hop lives,” had inspired more than one underground MC to declare himself dead. As the omnipotent what’s-hot-what’s-not market arbiter of the late nineties, Hot 97 had played matchmaker for hip hop and psychotic materialism, advising hip hop to stop returning phone calls from former lovers like Black Power and Social Responsibility, encouraging the couple to move in together, and finally, in an exclusive Aspen ceremony attended by three hundred CEOs and only a handful of artists and project-housing thugs, to exchange diamond-flooded Rolexes and sign the merger deal in blood. When the honeymoon waned, the station placated hip hop’s ornery elders, pissed and financially slighted, by paying periodic tribute to “the pioneers of the old school” with five-second announcements encouraging their audience of fourteen-year-old wannabe gangster macks to “know their history.”
None of which had jack to do with Red; his drive-time show remained untainted by payola, his very employment a paean to purer days. The crossfader glided clean across the mixer and into a classic, dancing New York City’s newest cabdriver straight down memory lane. “I useta roll up / this is a hold up, ain’t nothin’ funny / stop smilin’, be still / don’t nothin’ move but the money,” Rakim Allah intoned, smooth with the roughness, reflecting on the tax-free paper he had clocked before he “learned to earn / cause I’m Righteous”: before he joined the Five Percent Nation and gained Knowledge of Self and realized that the Original Asiatic Black Man was the Maker, the Owner, the Cream of the Planet Earth, Father of Civilization and God of the Universe. Before he became part of the Five Percent of the population who overstood the Supreme Mathematics and threw off the shackles of mental slavery to become Poor Righteous Teachers.
Macon knew the Five Percenters’ rules as well as any whiteboy could, first from listening to the lyrics of the Righteous and then from living at Lajuan’s crib in Jamaica Plain for the last fifteen months, where black men who called themselves Gods sat around all day with eyelids quartermasted from smoking blunts and drinking ninety-nine-cent twenty-two-ounce Ballantines, talking about women who were not called Earths, as doctrine dictated, but bitches. The apartment was a degenerate sitcom: jokes and laugh tracks, heated interlocking minutes of family therapy, “Son, son, listen” interruptions, sex convo and chess games and rhymes and rhymes and beats to the rhymes and the every-occasion, rain-sleet-or-pestilence query “Who’s going to the weedspot?”; long- ass conversations that flipped general to specific and then back again in an endless, fascinating, and pointless battle of verbs and philosophy, volume and religion, rhetoric and flowskills.
Macon had learned the most from Jihad, the big-entrance- making uninvited drop-in neighbor the audience loved: a Newport-smoking, monologue-spitting herbologist with matching Nikes for every rugby shirt he owned and a penchant for talking the esoteric God Body Science of the Five Percenters from one mouth corner and hustle-ego-watch-me as unfiltered as New York tap water out the other. Macon’s star-vehicle spin-off, cats joked, would be a show called Adopted Brother. They plotted episodes in the perennial back-alley twilight that slashed in sideways from the street lamp and gave the dust something to dance in besides the glow of the forever-on TV.
Chinese takeout boxes filled the garbage can, and a ten-pound bag of white rice lived a bachelor’s life in the one uncorroded cabinet. Cats would go to the store for hot sauce, barbecue sauce, ranch dressing, go to McDonald’s and jack three hundred little ketchup packets, whatever you could pour on rice for flavor. Only on Sunday afternoons did they sit down and really eat, and then only because when Macon moved in he’d instituted-slash-sponsored the ritual of family dinners. They’d make turkey lasagna, Jihad and Aura grating cheese into silver mixing bowls and making Sal’s Pizzeria jokes from Do the Right Thing and Macon sitting in Lajuan’s room, where he hid to do his writing, scribbling in a notebook and listening at the same time, overhearing and folding what was overheard into his thoughts like mushrooms into an omelet.
Everything was always too much in that crib; the drinks too strong, the weed too harsh, the conversation too aggressive, the chess battles waged on the bootleg coffee table too long and reckless, the music too loud. Dudes cut each other off, spoke fast and until interrupted, acted like the dilettante scientific and social analogies they constructed were the perfect tools of proof—which somehow they often were, like “Naah, son . . . SON! Do the knowledge: Boom, it’s like magnetic attraction. The gravitation doesn’t work unless the shit is mutual, so ‘love is blind’ is Now Cipher, God. It’s like how some cats say that niggas can’t be racist, you know, you know the science on that, you can’t be racist unless you have the power to be racist, so boom, you can’t say you in love unless you both in love; one person in love is like the sound of one hand clapping, God.”
Macon switched lanes without signaling, loving the order and chaos of Manhattan driving, and made an arbitrary right turn. He’d learned his way around already, before he’d even posed for his driver’s ID; it had taken him all of a week. New York was simple, a grid: choices galore, traffic laws optional. Boston, by contrast, was a lunatic maze of dead ends and one-ways, a city whose streets had evolved from cowpaths to highways with no sign of topological supervision. Macon had spent all twenty years of his life there, and even on his final day of work at the charter-car service, he’d gotten lost carting a vanful of Japanese businessmen to a suburban conference. Now exhilaration filled him and he tightened his left-handed grip on the wheel: Fuck racist-ass, provincial Boston. New York City, baby. Here at last. The center of the universe. He turned the music up, digging the unity of place and soundscape, relishing not just his understanding of each line of Rakim’s verse, but the fact that he could scarcely remember a time when he hadn’t known this shit.
With idle pride, Macon scrolled through some of what he knew. The Ten Percent were the bloodsuckers of the poor. They had Knowledge of Self but were not Righteous, and they preyed on the ignorance of the Eighty-Five who were Deaf, Dumb, and Blind to the truth. The Divine Alphabet allowed Gods and Earths to communicate in code; when Sadat X from Brand Nubian rhymed “the born cipher cipher master / makes me think much faster,” he meant the b-o-o-m, the boom, the weed. One hundred and twenty sacred Lessons awaited mastery; Jihad had sometimes disappeared behind a plywood bedroom door to study, or claim he was studying and smoke a blunt for dolo. Elijah Muhammad’s old Caucasian creation myth—the evil scientist Dr. Yacub grafts a barbaric white race from the Original Asiatic Black, a warlike people banished to the caves of cold, dark Europe but destined to rule the earth for sixty centuries—was tacitly endorsed, and white folks were called devils.
But were all white people devils? Could there be exceptions? What about that dude Paul C., who’d engineered Eric B. & Rakim’s album? What about Macon, who built with the Gods morning, noon, and night, passed out alongside them on perpendicular couches with his sneakers touching theirs, high off shared wack buddha? Macon had lost sleep looking for a loophole back in 1990, when the smoovest MC on the planet was Grand Puba Maxwell, asking “Can a Devil fool a Muslim? No, not nowadays bro,” and declaring, “It’s time to drop the bomb and make the Devil pay the piper.”
From Macon’s confusion had bubbled anger. How dare black people not see him as an ally, not recognize that he was down? He retaliated by studying their history, their culture: He was a thirteen-year-old whiteboy in a Malcolm X T-shirt, alone at the first annual Boston Hip Hop Conference, heart fluttering with intimidation and delight as scowling bald-headed old schoolers pointed at his chest, demanding, “Whatchu know about that man?” Which was exactly what he’d wanted, why he’d worn it. He ran down Malcolm’s life for them, watched them revise their expressions with inward elation, nodded studiously at their government assassination theories, rhymed when the chance presented itself. Tagged other graffiti writers’ blackbooks and wondered what it would take to be scratched from the devil list for good.
And yet history was overwhelming, and down deep Macon knew the truth. Who but white folks, his folks, had been so brutal for so long? He’d retreated briefly into his own Judaism, Jewish-not-white, with its analogous history of victimization and enslavement, but he couldn’t make it fit, couldn’t make himself feel Jewish, didn’t know what being Jewish felt like. He tossed the Star of David medallion Grandma had given him back into the dresser after a day, reflecting that race pride was a f...
