It would also mean that they couldn’t tell that I was black, which knocks the breath out of me whenever it happens.
If they could tell, it would be horrifying. Because then they’d be tempting Lucius and me with retaliation, waiting for us to jump up and start shouting or hit someone so they could fight back or call the cops.
If they said, “We’ve just realized the error of our ways,” I wouldn’t believe them.
And who was I to them, anyway? Just some guy in their yard tonight, down the interstate and probably getting pulled over tomorrow.
If they said, “Well then, get off my property, nigger,” I’d have to decide how much faith I had in my bandmates. Would they follow me to the van? But what would be solved then? We’d drive to an all-night diner, furious, and this family would kick back, enjoying the extra space in their backyard, and go back to filling the night with “niggers.”
Lucius alone would stand up and say something ultracool like, “Hope y’all little men are happy back here with your pool. I’ve got big things to do,” before disappearing into the dark. And I felt that same impulse, Lucius trying to take the wheel in my body, getting heated when I held on and sat there, having these thoughts, taking a deep breath and realizing I couldn’t sleep in that house.
Just like that, the moment passed and it was too late to yell. I hated myself all the more for being so gutless. Maybe when I got home, the used classic rap CDs I’d bought a couple years after the fact would be gone, and my father would be blond.
Lucius sat in the shadow of the safety light, his white-and-orange basketball shoe tapping in the grass. Father and sons kept on, but all I could hear coming from their mouths was the word “nigger.”
“Nigger nigger nigger?” JJ asked his brother.
“Ha, nigger,” answered the young guy.
“Now, nigger nigger,” the father chimed in.
I could see each utterance of “nigger,” in graffiti-style red bubble letters, in an austere black font, in a yellow comic book explosion. The “niggers” swirled around and stayed, blocking my sight, until all three guys’ voices joined, chanting, “Nigger . . . nigger . . . nigger,” growing louder than the blood rushing in my ears.
Tim stood up. “I know a bar.”
The gravel lot was full of pickups, mostly new and clean. Lucius hooked my elbow and pulled me aside as the others entered the bar, twangy music disappearing with the door’s thump.
“What was that?” he asked, face all hat brim and shadow.
“I don’t know, man. Those guys were—”
“Naw.” He poked my chest. “You. What were you doing there?”
“I was . . . I didn’t know what to do.”
“Yeah, I could tell.” He looked down and away and wheeled back. I flinched, scared he was gonna swing at me. He shook his head, weaving on the little sidewalk by the door.
“What should I have done?” I asked.
Lucius stilled and looked at me again, hand out. “Give it to me.”
“What?”
“I said, give it to me,” he hissed.
“Give you what?”
The frustration from earlier was bubbling up, making me shout.
A top-heavy white guy with nicotine yellow hair and a tucked-in plaid shirt stepped out into the night and looked our way. I gave him a nod like you do when you get caught arguing with your girlfriend. He tucked his chin, dragged on his cigarette, and swiveled into the lot, gravel crunching as he made tracks to his truck.
“This ain’t your first time playing dumb tonight,” said Lucius. His hand was still out, brown skin smudgy in the neon beer light.
“Not that.”
“Yes,” he said.
My hand flew to my hip pocket, covering my wallet, where my Black Card rested between a sub-shop punch card and my old student ID.
“No.” I stepped back. Lucius followed. “It hasn’t expired yet.”
“Don’t matter,” he said. “It’s not yours no more. You let those crackers act a fool and didn’t say a damn thing. Your pale, mixed ass just sat there like some sorta white boy. So, that’s what you are. You ain’t black no more.”
I thought of every hip-hop listening session, the talks my pop gave me about police, how choked up I got reading Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.
Now I was an ex-colored man. Dad was a couple hundred miles away, growing paler in the moonlight, his scissor-cut ’fro straightening. Had I ever been a colored man?
I sighed and slid the card out of my wallet, eye lingering on the last black privilege:
. . . most important, a healthy and vocal skepticism of white folks aka crackers aka honkies.
That was the clincher. I handed him the card, eyes welling up.
It wasn’t fair. I might have just had my chance to prove my blackness, but every other chance I’d blown had led up to that moment. Every little bit of black life I missed while out in the suburbs, until I got so nervous that I’d be rejected for not being black enough, that I clenched up and turned it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. And from every run-in with the cops to this mess of a night, I’d had plenty of time to grow skeptical of white folks’ acceptance. Instead, I’d dug in deeper, until I wound up handing over my Black Card outside a North Carolina country bar.
I was useless to black people. White people only wanted me when they thought I was white, or when they needed some entertainment. I’d show everyone. I shoulder-checked Lucius as I stepped into the bar with a powerful thirst.
The music didn’t scratch to a stop or anything, but I caught eyes sliding across me and tensed, wondering if this was a night where all strange white folks were as racist as JJ’s family.
That “Earl had to die” country song was playing, but it sounded different from the radio. At the back of the room were two long-faced white women with perms, one in a wheelchair, the other bent to share the microphone, singing in lazy unison. It was karaoke night. I smiled. How was I gonna reclaim what I’d lost? How could I make karaoke night at an all-white country bar a black experience?
The place was homey and not quite a dive, wood-paneled and crowded with people in their thirties and older. Lucius passed me, headed to an empty barstool by the bathrooms.
I joined my bandmates at the middle of the bar. Mason had the bartender pouring a row of whiskeys while Tim from the local band leaned on a stool and talked to a woman with pulled-high jeans.
Russell raised an eyebrow. “So . . .”
I nodded and said, “So . . .” too.
“Those people were real,” Russell paused, “hicks.”
“You mean racist?” I asked.
It came out sharper than I expected and, for once, I didn’t smooth out the anger with a laugh. I took a moment to relish the pause that gave Russell. Angry black man in the house! Angry ex-black man in the house!
I shook my head like Lucius had done outside and asked Russell, “What should I have done, man?”
“I dunno. What can you do? Tell them they’re