He stared at me, waiting for an answer. At home we didn’t get in other people’s faces like that. You talked toward a space and the other person had a choice of entering or not entering, but this guy’s blue eyes bored directly into mine. Waiting, challenging, prepared to send a message to that sneering mouth. I wanted no part of him, his records, or his questions.
Blues. Well, that’s all I listen to. I like different songs at different times. Midnighters. Drifters got one I like out now.
Not that R-and-B crap on the radio, man. Like the real blues. Down home country blues. The old guys picking and singing.
Ray Charles. I like Ray Charles.
Hey, that ain’t blues. Tell him, Darryl.
Darryl don’t need to tell me anything. Been listening to blues all my life. Ray Charles is great. He’s the best there is. How you gon tell me what’s good and not good? It’s my music. I’ve been hearing it all my life.
You’re still talking about rock ’n’ roll. Rhythm and blues. Most of it’s junk. Here today and gone tomorrow crap. I’m talking about authentic blues. Big Bill Broonzy. The Classics.
When he talked, he twisted his mouth so the words slithered out of one corner of his face, like garbage dumped off one end of a cafeteria tray. He pulled a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket. Lit it without disturbing the sneer.
Bet you’ve never even heard Bill Broonzy.
Don’t need to hear no Broonzy or Toonsy or whoever the fuck he is. I don’t give a shit about him nor any of them other old-timey dudes you’re talking about, man. I know what I like and you can call it rhythm and blues or rock ’n’ roll, it’s still the best music. It’s what I like and don’t need nobody telling me what’s good.
What are you getting mad about, man? How can you put down something you know nothing about? Bill Broonzy is the greatest twelve-string guitar player who ever lived. Everybody knows that. You’ve never heard a note he’s played but you’re setting yourself up as an expert. This is silly. You obviously can’t back up what you’re saying. You have a lot to learn about music, my friend.
He’s wagging his big head and looking over at Darryl like Darryl’s supposed to back his action. You can imagine what’s going through my mind. How many times I’ve already gone upside his fat jaw. Biff. Bam. My fists were burning. I could see blood running out both his nostrils. The sneer split at the seams, smeared all over his chin. Here’s this white boy in this white world bad-mouthing me to one of the few black faces I get to see, messing with the little bit of understanding I’m beginning to have with Darryl. And worse, trespassing on the private turf of my music, the black sounds from home I carry round in my head as a saving grace against the pressures of the university.
Talk about uptight. I don’t believe that pompous ass could have known, because even I didn’t know at that moment, how much he was hurting me. What hurt most was the truth of what he was saying. His whiteness, his arrogance made me mad, but it was truth putting the real hurt on me.
I didn’t hit him. I should have but never did. A nice forget-me-knot upside his jaw. I should have but didn’t. Not that time. Not him. Smashing his mouth would have been too easy, so I hated him instead. Let anger and shame and humiliation fill me to overflowing so the hate is still there, today, over twenty years later. The dormitory room had pale green walls, a bare wooden floor, contained the skimpy desk and sagging cot allotted to each cubicle in the hall. Darryl’s things scattered everywhere. A self-portrait he’d painted stared down from one dirt-speckled wall. The skin of the face in the portrait was wildly molded, violent bruises of color surrounding haunted jade eyes. Darryl’s eyes were green like my brother David’s, but I hadn’t noticed their color until I dropped by his room one afternoon between classes and Darryl wasn’t there and I didn’t have anything better to do than sit and wait and study the eyes in his painting. Darryl’s room had been a sanctuary but when the white boy started preaching there was no place to hide. Even before he spoke the room had begun to shrink. He sprawled, lounged, an exaggerated casualness announcing how comfortable he felt, how much he belonged. Lord of the manor wherever he happened to plant his boots.
Darryl cooled it. His green eyes didn’t choose either of us when we looked toward him for approval. Dawson had to see what a miserable corner I was in. He had to feel that room clamped tight around my neck and the sneer tugging the noose tighter.
A black motorcycle jacket, carved from a lump of coal, studded with silver and rhinestones, was draped over the desk chair. I wanted to stomp it, chop it into little pieces.
Hey, you guys, knock it off. Let’s talk about something else. Obviously you have different tastes in music.
Darryl knew damn well that wasn’t the problem. Together we might have been able to say the right things. Put the white boy in his place. Recapture some breathing space. But Darryl had his own ghosts to battle. His longing for his blonde, blue-eyed Putney girl friend whose parents had rushed her off to Europe when they learned of her romance with the colored boy who was Putney school president His ambivalence toward his blackness that would explode one day and hurtle him into the quixotic campaign of the Black Revolutionary Army to secede from the United States. So Darryl cooled it that afternoon in his room and the choked feeling never left my throat. I can feel it now as I write.
Why did that smartass white son of a bitch have so much power over me? Why could he confuse me, turn me inside out, make me doubt myself? Waving just a tiny fragment of truth, he could back me into a corner. Who was I? What was I? Did I really fear the truth about myself that much? Four hundred years of oppression, of lies had empowered him to use the music of my people as a weapon against me. Twenty years ago I hadn’t begun to comprehend the larger forces, the ironies, the obscenities that permitted such a reversal to occur. All I had sensed was his power, the raw, crude force mocking me, diminishing me. I should have smacked him. I should have affirmed another piece of the truth he knew about me, the nigger violence.
Darryl and I would ride buses across Philly searching for places like home. Like the corner of Frankstown and Bruston in Homewood. A poolroom, barbershop, rib joint, record store strip with bloods in peacock colors strolling up and down and hanging out on the corner. After a number of long, unsuccessful expeditions (how could you ask directions? Who in the island of University would know what you were asking, let alone be able to tell you how to get there?), we found South Street. Just over the bridge, walking distance if you weren’t in a hurry, but as far from school, as close to home as we could get. Another country.
Coming home from the university, from people and situations that continually set me against them and against myself, I was a dangerous person. If I wanted to stay in one piece and stay in school, I was forced to pull my punches. To maintain any semblance of dignity and confidence I had to learn to construct a shell around myself. Be cool. Work on appearing dignified, confident. Fool people with appearances, surfaces, live my real life underground in a region where no one could touch me. The trouble with this survival mechanism was the time and energy expended on upkeep of the shell. The brighter, harder, more convincing and impenetrable the shell became, the more I lost touch with the inner sanctuary where I was supposed to be hiding. It was no more accessible to me than it was to the people I intended to keep out. Inside was a breeding ground for rage, hate, dreams of vengeance.
Nothing original in my tactics. I’d adopted the strategy of slaves, the oppressed, the powerless. I thought I was running but I was fashioning a cage. Working hand in hand with my enemies. Knowledge of my racial past, of the worldwide struggle of people of color against the domination of Europeans would have been invaluable. History could have been a tool, a support in the day-to-day confrontations I experienced in the alien university environment. History could have taught me I was not alone, my situation was not unique. Believing I was alone made me dangerous, to myself and others.
College was a time of precipitous ups