Chapter Eight
The Black Like Me rally in Washington Square Park was Dominique’s idea. He envisioned it as high theater of the absurd, a Million Wigger March where white folks could show up after a hard day of apologizing to Negroes and renouncing their whiteness to eat bean pies, have their hair cornrowed, and absorb abuse from a lineup of venomous speakers.
“Maybe we can get Khalid Muhammad,” he fantasized. “You think he’d speak to an all-white group?”
After
Pedantic Perspectives,
things had gotten hectic, to the point where Macon longed for the relative calm of forty-eight hours ago, when going outside had been as simple as walking past a teeming clot of protesters, head tucked to his chest and with a two-man escort. Those salad days were gone now. Macon hadn’t left the dorm at all. Andre tried to go to class once, fought his way through the reporters, and didn’t have the energy to do it again. Logan, still a media cipher, ran errands for all of them. She hadn’t been to work all week. Nique had gone in only once, and his loyal, neglected customers had created a highly suspicious traffic jam.
The Race Traitor Project’s press release, detailing the objectives of the Day of Apology and the time and location of the Black Like Me rally to follow, had been reprinted in newspapers across the map, with fanfare and op-ed like a motherfucker. A surprising number of papers had also printed the mail-order offer that accompanied the statement: Write care of Dominique Lavar to order your official Day of Apology T-shirts, quality 100 percent cotton garments available in a variety of colors and designs, available for a limited time for only $16.95 plus shipping and handling.
The media, geeked off Macon Mania, of which they were both cause and tool, ran with the ball, and Nique pimpstrutted with I-told-you-so bravado through the sound bites, anguished screams, and weed-smoke billows of Control Room 1107, a tiny brain trust enclave, mountain hideaway, refuge, and dungeon—TV brain screens dense with snow and everybody poised/exhausted, horrified, bemused, up for the downstroke, senses dulled but overloading as the shit flew by: Macon Detornay’s Day of Apology; the racial apocalypse is now upon us; whiteboys lead the charge into the inkwell; Amos and Andy show up at the local hospital requesting surgery, seems they like coon stage paint better than their birth mugs;
this is madness/this madness is madness;
throngs of screaming
Fuck No
protesters and fans both local and imported clash all up and down Columbia’s frat row, nearest point of entry to the freshman dorm where any minute now, thought Macon, any time, one of those Never Apologize crackers down outside my window might lay hands on some Columbia ID and shuffle past the front desk, ride up here and mosey down the hall and blast me.
A thousand
I’m Listening
letters, e-mails, phone calls, sixty for every
Nigger Lover Die,
whiteboys and whitegirls sneaking arsonist looks all around them,
this is wrong, just wrong, my parents
friends life wrong,
many interested, cautious, curious, sad, pissed off, skeptical black folks wondering, glancing up and down the fresh-pressed length of this potential/disaster,
mufucker apologize
to me I’ll wring his neck—Please, fool, you’ll take whatever these
white folks dish out like always—finally some progress
—in the news today the news today the news today:::colossal joke? inside the mind of Dominique Lavar, Macon Detornay’s spokesman and some say the spinmaster behind the the thethethe—tired feeling always behind Macon’s eyes, even five minutes post–morning piss, everybody always crashing to sleep instead of drifting, passing out with their shoes on in sudden narcoleptic snatches. One time Andre started snoring with a half-eaten pizza slice in his hand, conked out for three hours like that. Fleet Walker’s book seemed glued to Macon’s hand at all times now; he read and reread and sometimes insisted on speaking whole sections aloud to Andre, who quietly despised listening but had started picking up the book himself when Macon put it down. Sometimes one or the other of them would devolve mid-convo into grunts of agreement, and then the other, or Nique, or Logan, would notice that the book was open:
We mulattos have felt the push and pull of white and blackness
like perhaps no other race—if a race is in fact what we are.
Throughout my life, I have glimpsed opportunity and oppression
as though I had two sets of eyes, or as though I were in the practice of opening first my left and then my right and then my left,
watching the world bounce back and forth between the two perspectives, never quite synthesizing or settling: African, American,
African, American. The insertion of a hyphen between the two, as
favored by some of the newer Negro leaders, serves only to render
a fellow cross-eyed.
A general fallacy among white Americans is the tendency to assumemulattos to be the result of miscegenation. The truth is that
many families, including my own, have been that way for generations:half-and-halfs marry half-and-halfs and thus a caste is born.
But the belief is at the crux of the dilemma we mulattos face. We
are walking proof of something white and black people alike
would rather pretend does not occur, proof of either violence or
intimacy between the races. Our existence is the punch line to a
dirty joke.
Many whites likewise indulge in a belief that the only education
afforded blacks during Reconstruction was to be had in one-room
schoolhouses—just as they think that in slave times the only way
we learned to read was if Miss Anne took a liking to a lucky young
house nigger and taught him at her knee. That, too, is hogwash.
There were more black senators and congressmen during Reconstructionthan there are today. More black businesses, too, and
better ones. My father, a freeman born in Ohio, was a doctor
throughout my youth. My brother Weldy became one in his later
years as well. He went to school and earned a degree in homeopathy,in point of fact.
I myself graduated from Oberlin College, the first integrated institution of higher learning in the nation, almost fifty years ago
now, as a member of the Class of 1882. Passed up law school to
play baseball. Or, as my father was fond of saying, “chose a boy’s
folly over a man’s life.” He still came to cheer me on, though.
I wish I could recall more of what went through my mind when
I was in the public eye, what I did with all the rage my dignity and
refinement forced back deep inside me—so deep that it began to
corrode, disintegrate me a little at a time. By the end of my playing
days, I hated myself and the two races swimming together in my
bloodstream. I longed to slice open my veins and watch the double
fountain spray from my upturned wrist, white blood spurting right
and black blood geysering left toward Africa, their years of fightinginside me finally done.
How do you react when you pick up the newspaper after game
day—year in and year out, mind you—and read, “The brunette
catcher Walker carried himself like a perfect gentleman,” when
some reporter’s attempt at liberalism is to dutifully report the
startling news that the nigger didn’t rip anyone’s arms off today,
didn’t revert to his savage ancestral ways and eat the umpire or
beat on homeplate with his mighty member while chanting voodoocurses—but there’s always tomorrow? Are you grateful when
they compliment your comportment, laud your game-winning hit,
or is every word another brushstroke in the coon painting, evidenceeither for the prosecution or the defense, and it doesn’t matterwhich because what’s on trial is your humanity and that’s bad
enough?
Perhaps it was too much for me to handle. I’ve got a few firsts
to my name besides first black major leaguer that might lead you
to think so. First nigger in Ohio to kill a white man and go free—
the victim an Irish laborer who assaulted me on my way home
from a tavern two years after the end of my playing days and soon
discovered that I was not so foolish as to walk through this white
world without a knife. I pled self-defense and righteously so, althoughmy own celebrity and the team of white Oberlin law professorswho assembled to take up their old student’s cause was
what truly carried the day.
First black man—among the first, leastways—to grow so sick
and frustrated with this country and the hopelessness of being
black and being white and being black and white that, when I was
fifty years of age—the first thirty-five of them spent integrating
what is now known as the Great American Pastime, and which has
now long been entirely segregated—I said to hell with this damn
nation, with its absurd notions of living side by side, former slave
and former master, hate glinting back and forth across the rhododendronbushes. Let’s evacuate the Negroes en masse, by force if
necessary, and return to Africa.
I wrote a tract to that effect, entitled “Our Home Colony,”
which remains quietly on file at the Library of Congress, and almost nowhere else—its general failure to galvanize a response a
blessing in disguise, because if there was anything I hated more
than white prejudice at that time, it was black people. The century
had just turned, and I had been forced out of baseball and begun
to drink and to despair. In myself, blacks, whites, mulattos—you
name it, I’d lost faith in it. If it was inside me, I didn’t want it.
A man can only compromise for so long before he forgets he’s
compromising at all, before some part of him feels he deserves the
treatment he’s receiving or blames something close by for it. If
black people could only act more like me, I often thought, then I
would not have to suffer guilt by association. Toe the line long
enough and the world beyond the line blurs. A man learns to hate
above all else whatever is close enough to lash out at, becomes
conditioned to attack only that for which he will be rewarded.
Self-hatred, of course, was no cause for embarrassment. Open
any black magazine and you could read your fill of advertisements
for skin-bleaching products guaranteed to make you white. Visit
your local university and you could hear any number of black
scholars and lecturers lamenting the American Negro as the lowest,basest son of Africa. I thank God that I no longer count myself
among their ranks.
“It is contrary to everything in the nature of man and almost
criminal to attempt to harmonize these two diverse peoples while
living under the same government,” I wrote whilst in the grip of
that madness. “The Negro has no ideals of his own; nor can he
have. Everything that pertains to his own ethnic type he despises,
and this is done in most cases unconsciously.”
The strange wisdom of these words becomes clear to me now,
for even as I wrote such things—and it was mulattos for whom I
saved my harshest words, writing that “It is impossible to make a
hybrid race of men. What is to prevent this progeny from being
worse than animal? Such creatures are more dangerous to societythan wild beasts, for these last can easily be hunted and shot,
while the former go on procreating their lecherous kind withouthindrance”—I never truly included myself. I condemned the
American Negro and the future of race in America with vigor and
venom, called for the wholesale return of blacks to Africa and
authorized the use of force if it proved necessary, but never for a
moment did I intend to leave the country. Perhaps I realized, even
then, that I would only have been running from myself. I’ve dashed
from clusters of reporters and mobs of white folks, raced against
low throws on a line from right field to home plate and after trains
gathering speed outside Atlanta, run for my life and for my livelihood,and nothing is so exhausting as trying to sprint past your
shadow.
I’ve often reflected that perhaps the small taste of equality I had
as a student was what made the world outside seem all the more
oppressive. Never in my life have I been able to forget that I was
black, but at Oberlin I came the closest. Today, the entire campus
has fallen victim to de facto segregation, but during my time there
I ate and studied alongside white people and felt more or less the
same as everybody else—and often better, because I could hit a
baseball farther.
I left school nurturing the naive notion that while I was on the
baseball field all else would be forgotten. Politics and hatred might
surround the idea of my participation, I told myself, but once I
crossed the foul line chalked in the brilliant green grass, I would
enter a sanctuary, a place of peace governed only by sportsman-ship.When I stepped up to the plate to take my three swings at immortality,the same as any player got, those crowds would be
forced to see a man.
But when I joined the International League, the world reasserteditself with a vengeance, and I was once again a lonely black
man playing a white game in which the rules kept changing. I
learned two things my first day on the job: As long as I played I’d
be risking danger and humiliation, and as long as I played I’d be
guaranteed the spotlight. I didn’t realize until the following morning,when I picked up the newspaper, that as long as I played I’d
also be the foil for a public discussion of race. From that day on,
my name never appeared in the newspaper without some epithet
before it, benign or malignant—I was the colored Walker, the
coon Walker, the brunette or dusky or Spanish or mulatto or niggerWalker. A traveling symbol of blackness whose performance
would, for a few hours, condemn or confirm the dogmas of white
racism.