Macon narrowed his eyes, cleared his throat, and hocked a gob of blood and spit. “Thanks, Nique.”
“Think nothing of it, dude. Just glad you’ve come around.”
“Fuck you.”
“Come on, Moves. You know you can’t front on this. Stop trying.”
“Boss?” said Johnnie.
Donner silenced him with a raised palm. “Hold on. Now, Macon, I’m prepared to substantially increase my offer—”
“Boss, he needs help.” Johnnie was pulling Leo to his feet, draping the old man’s arm over his shoulders and holding him around the waist. “We ought to get him to a doctor.”
Leo’s face was bloodied and misshapen, almost unrecognizable. He half-lifted a rubbery arm and winced with the effort of speaking. “He broke my nose,” the old man managed, in a blood-garbled whisper. “He didn’t pull a single punch. He—”
“It’s true,” vouched Johnnie. He shifted under Leo’s weight, rebalanced him, and glanced over at Burleigh with nervous eyes. “He knocked him unconscious, Doc, and hit him with the rifle, too.” Burleigh squared his shoulders, face set hard. The pistol dangled from his finger.
Nique fisted his hands on his hips, looked the clerk up and down, and turned to Donner, scowling. “This how you treat the brothers, Con?” he demanded. “What kind of hillbilly assholes you got working for you, man?” He pointed a long, sharp finger at Leo. “What type of acting you call that?”
“I’ll deal with this later!” Donner roared. “I’m trying to negotiate, here!”
“You’ll deal with this now,” said Burleigh placidly. The woods went quiet, and suddenly Macon was staring straight into the small black barrel of the pistol. “As for acting, well, I guess you could say I been playing myself these past few months, Dr. Donner. Could’ve kept at it a while longer, but sometimes life presents you with certain opportunities, and you gotta take advantage of ’em while you can. Letting this son of a bitch live would be a goddamn crime against humanity.”
Acting, thought Macon numbly. His limbs felt heavy, alien, his body no longer his own. Acting. That’s all any of us does. The idea struck him suddenly and from a great distance, like the whistle of an approaching train.
“Motherfucker!” Nique charged forward, only to stop cold when the gun lined up with his chest.
“Easy there, boy.” Burleigh shooed him with the pistol and Nique retreated, palms raised to his chest. “This ain’t about you. Not unless you make it. Same goes for you, Doc. Far as I’m concerned, you’ve done some good in your time, so you best to just walk away and let me and Macon finish up our business man to man.”
Burleigh trained the gun. Macon blinked at him, then closed his eyes and clenched his teeth, waiting with a calm beyond horror for help or hell. This is how a martyr dies, he thought, pulse sounding in his ears. At the hands of some redneck, some meaningless fucking stranger he’s never seen before. And yet there was something intensely familiar about Burleigh: a gruesome glee that Macon recognized despite his desire not to.
“Burleigh, no!” Johnnie scrambled to the clerk’s side, anguished. “Please, Burl,” he pleaded. “I know you don’t wanna kill a white man.”
Burleigh squinted at his target. “He ain’t been white for a long time.”
“You saw the way he hit the nigger, Burl. That’s gotta count for something.”
Burleigh cocked the gun. His voice was low and even.
“He’s gonna die for his cause.”
Macon heard the words and opened his eyes. The world poured in. He squeezed them shut and shook his head.
“No.”
Burleigh pulled the trigger, and Macon joined his ancestors.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Kat Aaron, Richard Abate, Jon Caramanica, Jeff Chang, Eugene Cho, Dave Cohen, T Cooper, Ricardo Cortes, Michael Cunningham, Gerald Cyrus, Ann Douglas, Michael Eric Dyson, Percival Everett, William Fisher, Stik Figya, DJ Frane, Josie Freedman, Keith Gessen, Lauren Grodstein, Victoria Häggblom, Mike Heppner, Danny Hoch, Christen Holzman, Brian Horton, Chris Jackson, Jim Kaplan, James Kass, KEO, KET, The Apple Juice Kid, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Adam Bhala Lough, Charles Mansbach, David Mansbach, Nancy Mansbach, Douglas McGowan, Mariann Nogrady, Robert G. O’Meally, PHASE 2, Scott Poulson-Bryant, Jonathan Powell, Tricia Rose, Ameen Saleem, Gil Scott-Heron, Kelvin Sholar, Mercer Sparks, Terry Southern, Johnny Temple, Brian Tester, Brandee Tidwell, Touré, Clyde Valentin, Oliver Wang, Andre C. Willis, Vernon Wilson, William Upski Wimsatt, Mario Yedidia, and David W. Zang, whose book
Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart: The Life of Baseball’s First
Black Major Leaguer
was a valuable source of information.
About the Author
Adam Mansbach’s previous books are the novel
Shackling Water
and the poetry collection
genius b-boy cynics getting weeded in the
garden of delights.
He is the former editor of the award-winning hip hop journal
Elementary,
and his writing has appeared in the
Boston Globe,
the
New York Times,
the
San Francisco Chronicle,
JazzTimes, Slate, Wax Poetics, The Best Music Writing 2004, Brook
lynNoir
, and elsewhere. He lives in Berkeley, California, and is at work on a third novel.
For more information, visit
www.adammansbach.com
Also by Adam Mansbach
FICTION
Shackling Water
POETRY
genius b-boy cynics getting weeded in the garden of delights
Copyright © 2005 by Adam Mansbach
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mansbach, Adam, 1976–
Angry black white boy, or, The miscegenation of Macon
Detornay: a novel / Adam Mansbach.— 1st ed.
1. College students—Fiction. 2. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.
3. Hate crimes—Fiction. 4. Robbery—Fiction. 5. Racism—Fiction.
I. Title: Angry black white boy. II. Title: Miscegenation of
Macon Detornay. III. Title.
PS3613.A57A64 2004
813’.6—dc22
2004014984
eISBN: 978-0-307-41979-8
v3.0