Angry Black White Boy: A Novel - Couverture souple

Mansbach, Adam

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1400054877 ISBN 13 : 9781400054879

Editeur : Crown, 2005

Synopsis

Book by Mansbach Adam

A propos du livre

Extrait

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 fashion trend he’d been completely iced out of. The sterling necklace’s drawer mate was the red-green-and-gold Increase the Peace medallion Macon had bought after Three Times Dope released their single of the same name; he’d copped it from a Downtown Crossing vendor as a less fly but more plausible alternative to the Africa medallions everybody was rocking post–Jungle Brothers. Macon never even wore it in his room.

Instead he lay on his bed in his parents’ house, music streaming past him low enough to go unheard in the kitchen below, and went to work constructing a rhetorical framework that would allow him to embrace the Five Percenters’ truths without capitulating his soul: White people aren’t evil, but evil is white people. There it was. Simple. Elegant. True. It bought Macon space to live in, to be special, angry, the exception, the crusader. The down whiteboy. You my nigga, Macon. You a’ight.

The light clicked green and Red switched up the soundtrack, segueing into “Days of Outrage, Operation Snatchback,” X-Clan’s song about being assaulted by cops at the Yusef Hawkins rally on the Brooklyn Bridge. Macon rolled his window down and dipped his elbow into the warm fall air, smiling. He remembered how when X-Clan’s album dropped in 1990—damn, had it been eight years already?—brothers in Boston had started wearing quasi-military African pimpgear just like them: nose rings, leather ankh caps, red-black-and-green bead necklaces, knee-high boots, carved wooden staffs. Macon had just scraped together the money to buy his first set of turntables that year, some bullshit Geminis, in the hopes of becoming a DJ—hopes soon aborted by impatience, mediocre rhythm, and the fact that he was surrounded by cats who actually caught rek on the decks, who brushed him aside and onto the mic so they could do so.

Brothers would congregate at his crib after school to freestyle and make mix tapes, trooping through the kitchen en route to the basement wearing some outlandish shit and baffling the hell out of his mother. Everyone was perfectly polite—“Hello, Mrs. Detornay”—and his mother said, “Hi, guys,” and smiled back, but if she had suspected before that she didn’t understand her son, a legion of staff-wielding pro-black rappers marching through her kitchen and interrupting her People magazine perusal certainly confirmed that shit.

A hand shot up on the west side of Wall Street, and Macon swerved to the man’s side. The stiff-armed gesture people used to summon taxis was only a few degrees north of the Nazi salute, Macon reflected as he hit the unlock button, and especially reminiscent when performed by somber-suited young businessmen. The vapors of entitlement that steamed from these yuppies irked him; they were so fucking sure the cab would stop for them. They’d never been snubbed in their lives, sized up and passed by because the driver thought they wouldn’t pay or that they wanted to be taken somewhere ghetto. Back home, Macon had flagged cabs while Lajuan and Aura stood discreetly down the block, pretending not to be with him, approaching only when Macon had the door open. It was another way, he thought with pride, that they had cheated racism.

Two guys in their early thirties clambered into Macon’s backseat. “Eighty-fifth and Fifth,” commanded the one on the left, a wispy blond who didn’t look up from the gold-rimmed glasses he was wiping with his necktie.

“We’re already fucking late,” the other one informed him. “The reservation was for six.” Mr. Punctuality’s dark hair was thinning on top; razor-burn flared from his neck as he pulled off his tie with a meaty left fist and undid his top button. On the night of Macon’s high-school prom, when he had dropped by in his father’s Camry to pick up Aura and his date, Aura’s mother had told Macon to remember three things as she redid his necktie for him: Nothing is sexier than a man who wants to be wearing his suit, nothing is unsexier than a man imprisoned by his suit, and a woman can always tell the difference. These jokers, Macon thought, were prisoners for sure.

The one on the left, Mr. Eighty-fifth and Fifth, had the same rock-solid Roman nose as a guy Macon had known in high school, a senior when Macon was a freshman. Scott Cartwright was probably president of his fraternity; he’d been lacrosse captain back then. Out of the blue one day, he had stopped Macon in the hall outside the cafeteria and poked a thick finger into Macon’s bird-chest.

“You think you’re pretty fuckin’ cool, huh, dude? Sitting at the black table, kickin’ it like you’re Vanilla Ice or something?”

Cartwright turned his dirty white baseball cap backward and bent into Macon’s face. “People laugh at you, dude. I don’t even know you, and I sit there and laugh my fuckin’ ass off.” Macon had stood for a moment staring back, tightroping the thread between provocation and cowardice, then asked, “Are we finished?” He’d been going for a kind of Sir, request dismissal tone, but Macon couldn’t disguise his boredom and the words sounded insolent instead. Scott slammed him up against a locker, mad corny, like they were characters in a John Hughes movie, and Macon wanted to want to laugh, but instead his ears burned and he wanted to kill Scott Cartwright, hated himself because at that moment he cared what Scott Cartwright thought of him—felt ridiculous, ashamed. And yet Macon knew he’d courted this. He wanted his defection from whiteness and his acceptance by black people to be public, the subject of wonder and envy, anger and scorn.

Just then Omari had rounded the corner: Macon’s homeboy, Cartwright’s co-captain. Scott backed away, sheathed his hands in khaki pockets,...

Revue de presse

"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

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Crown
• Date d'édition: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1400054877
• ISBN 13: 9781400054879
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 352