Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture

The Discovery of What It Meansto Be a Black Boy

It was wintertime, early in the morning. I was in the third grade,standing on the rectangular asphalt playground behind HolyTrinity Interparochial School in Westfield, New Jersey, palming atennis ball, waiting. Ned, nearsighted and infamous for licking thedusty soles of his penny loafers in the back of social studies class,was splayed against the cold orange brick wall of the school building.He had his head down and hands up, legs akimbo with his buttout, like a South American mule bracing herself to be searchedby border patrol. “Not so hard!” he cried, glancing back over hisshoulder through smudged Coke-bottle lenses.

“Put your head down!” another boy yelled.

“Fine, just do it and get it over with, then,” Ned muttered.

“Head down!” the boy said. I wound my arm back and let fly afastball that seemed to hang in the air for a second before rico-cheting from the small of Ned’s back like a Pete Sampras ace offsome hapless ball boy at Wimbledon. Ned jerked upright andhowled in pain. All my classmates screamed and high-fived me asthe bell rang and we rushed to grab our book bags and line up insize order before our teachers came to lead us indoors. I was stillthe undisputed king of Butts-Up, I thought to myself as I pulled myChicago Bulls Starter jacket over my uniform. Standing in line, waitingfor the younger grades to file past, I began mumbling to myselfbits of a song by Public Enemy, a song that my older brother hadbeen playing at home and that had gotten stuck in my head thatweek like the times tables or the Holy Rosary. “Yo, nigga, yoooooo,nigga, yoooo-oooooo, niiiigga . . .” I repeated the refrain over andover under my breath, unthinkingly, as I relived in my mind’s eyethe glorious coup de grace, the deathblow I’d just dealt Ned fromover ten yards away—Blaow!

“But you’re a nigger, too,” a voice said from behind me, and I halfmade out what I’d just heard, but not fully. I went on singing mysong, which I couldn’t claim to understand on any level, but whichsomehow made me feel cool as hell, and that was all that mattered.The voice repeated itself, louder this time: “But you’re a nigger,too, Thomas, aren’t you?”

“Huh?” I said, pivoting to see Craig standing there, his dirtyblondhair cut by his mother’s Flowbee into the shape of an upsidedownserving bowl, like a medieval friar without the bald spot.“What did you just say?”

“You’re a nigger, too, right, so how can you say that?”

“How can I say what?”

“‘Yo, nigga, yo, nigga’; how can you say that when you’re a nigger,too, right?”My mother is white, my father black. They met in San Diego in thelate 1960s. Both were entrenched on the West Coast front of whatat the time was called the War on Poverty. After San Diego, theywent up to Los Angeles. From L.A. they made their way north andmy father pursued doctoral studies in sociology at the Universityof Oregon. In 1975, and over my maternal grandfather’s dead body,they were married in Eugene at the county courthouse. They hadlittle money, fewer blessings, and plenty of love. Later, they movedagain to Spokane and my mother, Kathleen, gave birth to their firstchild, Clarence, named for my father. From Spokane the family continuallymoved east: first to Denver, then to Albany, then to Philadelphia,and finally to New Jersey, where I was born in 1981.

When I was one year old, my father switched professions andthe family moved again, this time from Newark, where he had beenrunning antipoverty programs for the Episcopal Archdiocese andmy mother had been raising my brother and me, to Fanwood, asmall suburb thirty minutes to the west on U.S. Route 22. Fanwood,like the space inside a horseshoe, is bordered on three sides by themuch larger township of Scotch Plains, and these two municipalitiesby and large function as one. They share a train station andpublic school system and together act as a kind of buffer groundbetween wealthy Westfield to the east and poor Plainfield to thewest. Riots and waves of white flight long ago left Plainfield avexed cross between a legitimate inner-city ghetto—with all therequisite crime, poverty, and hopelessness that go with that—andan emergent middle-class suburb that in many ways resemblesWestfield, except for the condition of the houses and the color ofthe residents. No such white flight occurred in Fanwood, ScotchPlains, or Westfield, although like so many small towns in NewJersey, they had their designated black pockets.

When my parents first began searching in the area, real estatebrokers only wanted to show them homes in Plainfield or on theredlined black sides of town. They said families like ours tendedto prefer things this way, but my father, whom we call Pappy in anod to his Southern roots, had led a childhood that was boxed inby formal segregation in Texas, and no longer could stand to betold where to live. Out of principle he said to the brokers thankyou but no thank you, and insisted on seeing all listings. Reluctantly,they caved and the four of us settled into a three-bedroomranch on Fanwood’s decidedly white side.

It was a neighborhood of well-kept homes with yards that wereflaired-up with inflatable IT’S A BOY! lawn signs, lighted holiday displays,and the occasional life-size Virgin Mary shrine. There weretwo main downtown areas in either direction of our house, withmore pizzerias than banks or dry cleaners and, to Pappy’s lament,without a single bookstore between them. Our neighbors werewhat my parents called “ethnic whites,” and they tended to growup, buy homes, have children, and die within a twenty-mile radiusof where they had been born—a fact that always seemed to strikeMom and Pappy as bizarre. As a family, we did not fit in with thesepeople, who often didn’t know what to make of us. Once when Iwas a very young boy, I was at the grocery store with my mother,misbehaving as little children do, when an older white womanwalked by and said, “Ugh, it must be so tough adopting those kidsfrom the ghetto.”

Despite my mother’s being white, we were a black and not aninterracial family. Both of my parents stressed this distinction andthe result was that, growing up, race was not so complicated anissue in our household. My brother and I were black, period. Myparents adhered to a strict and unified philosophy of race, the contentsof which boil down to the following: There is no such thingas being half-white, for black, they explained, is less a biologicalcategory than a social one. It is a condition of the mind that isloosely linked to certain physical features, but more than anythingit is a culture, a challenge, and a discipline. We were taught fromthe moment we could understand spoken words that we would betreated by whites as though we were black whether we liked it ornot, and so we needed to know how to move in the world as blackmen. And that was that.

Questions of the soul were less clear. My mother is Protestant,the daughter of an evangelical Baptist minister. My father is whathe calls a Geopolitical-Existentialist-Secularist-Humanist-Realist,which really is just his way of saying he doesn’t put much stock inorganized religion. Nevertheless, after very nearly being homeschooled,Clarence and I were enrolled in private Catholic schoolsfor what my father described as “the superior levels of discipline”they offered in relation to the public schools nearby.

Another factor in the decision was the day Clarence camehome from School One, about a half-block away from our frontdoor, dazed and unable to speak. He was in the second grade andmy father had given him an oxblood leather briefcase. Apparently,this made him stand out among the other boys. So did his suntannedskin, which after the long hot summer was the color ofmaple honey; and his hair, which was styled in a large sphericalAfro and which in his childhood was light brown with strands ofblond and something like sherry in it: beautiful. My mother andsometimes my father would comb my brother’s Afro in the morningswith an orange tin can of Murray’s dressing grease and a blackplastic pick. “You look distinguished now, son,” Pappy would say,and smile when he was finished with him, distinguished being therarest and highest compliment in his vocabulary.

Clarence was a quiet boy with thick hair, good muscle tone, andintelligent almond-shaped eyes beneath bushy brown eyebrows.That day at school a group of white children had cornered andtaunted him on the yard, asking what a fucking monkey had to dowith a briefcase. Either the other black students didn’t see thishappen or they chose not to intervene. Pappy yanked Clarencefrom public school the next day. By the time I was old enough, beingin class with our neighbors was not even an option.

Unlike some children of mixed-race heritage, I didn’t ever wish tobe white. I wanted to be black. One of the first adult books myparents gave to me, around age seven, was Alex Haley’s The Autobiographyof Malcolm X. Often my mother would come into myroom in the evening and discuss with me what I was reading. Forseveral nights, I lay awake long after she had turned out the lights,haunted by the image of Malcolm’s father lying prone on the railroadtracks, his body torn in two and his cranium cracked openlike a coconut husk. I didn’t want to resemble in any way whatsoeverthose men who did things like that to other men.

It was a fortunate thing for me, too, that I didn’t want to bewhite. It was fortunate because I really didn’t have much choice inthe matter. My parents were right: Around white kids, I simply wasnot white. Whatever fantasies of passing may have threatened tosteal into my mulatto psyche and wreak havoc there were dispelledearly on, when Tina turned around in her chair, flipped herbronze ponytail to the side, and asked me point-blank, and audiblyenough for the whole classroom to hear, “Hey, why doesn’t yourhair move like everyone else’s?”

“It’s because I’m black,” I told her, and I wasn’t angry or embarrassed.It was just a fact, I felt, the way that she was husky orbig-boned.

Though we didn’t speak about it outright, I don’t think mybrother, Clarence, ever wanted to be white, either. He just didn’tseem to see race everywhere around him like my parents and I did.Or if he saw it, he fled from it and didn’t want to analyze it or haveto spend his time unraveling it. He didn’t want to be forced tomake a big deal out of it. He was forgiving and trusting and foundcompanions wherever they would be his. His two best friendswere black, and he dated a quiet Asian girl for a spell during highschool. Mostly, though, he fell in with a set of neighborhood whiteboys with lots of vowels in their surnames and little in their heads.These white boys were almost certainly the same ones who, yearsearlier, had demeaned my brother with racial epithets on thatSchool One playground (the neighborhood is not that big). ButClarence never knew how to hold a grudge, and that was ages agoand these were his neighbors and they liked to do the things thathe liked to do: ride bikes, ride skateboards, talk cars, smoke cigarettes,cut class, hang out. And they did take him in as one of theirown, that’s true, although I could see even as a child that they didso without ever fully allowing him to rest his mind, to forget thathe was black and that he was somehow other. Still, I can’t fault mybrother for going the way he felt was most comfortable. He was achild of the late ’70s and ’80s; hip-hop hadn’t completely circumscribedthe world he was formed in. I was a child of the late ’80sand ’90s, on the other hand. I went the other route.

Not that it was always an easy route to go. It was not enoughsimply to know and to accept that you were black—you had to lookand act that way, too. You were going to be judged by how convincinglyyou could pull off the pose. One day when I was around nineyears old, my mother drove Clarence and me over to Unisex HairCreationz, a black barbershop in a working-class section of Plainfield. Back then we had a metallic blue, used Mercedes-Benz sedan,which from the outside seemed in good condition, though underneaththe hood it was anything but, as the countless repair billsPappy juggled would attest. While the three of us waited for thelight to change colors, I became transfixed by the jittery figure of along, thin black woman in a stained T-shirt and sweatpants, a greasyscarf wrapped around her head. She was holding an inconsolablebaby in one hand and puffing on a long cigarette with the other,stalking the second-floor balcony of a beat-up old Victorian mansionthat had been converted into apartments.

I must have really been staring at her, because all of a sudden Inoticed that she wasn’t aimlessly pacing back and forth anymorebut pointing and yelling specifically at our car. “What the fuck areyou staring at?” she howled. “You rich, white motherfuckers in yourMurr-say-deez, go the fuck home! You think you can just come andwatch us like you in a goddamn zoo?”

She was making a scene. Passersby in the street were takingnotice and looking at our car, too. That was a time when Benzeswere the shit and you had to be careful where you parked becausetough guys would pull off the little hood ornament and wear itfrom a chain around their necks—ready-made jewelry. I was terriblyuncomfortable being the center of attention there in that backseat,mentally pleading for the light to turn green. I was alsoconfused as hell. Who were these white people this woman keptreferring to? Was she talking about . . . us—was she talking aboutme? Of course my mother was white, but I didn’t understand howshe could think I was white, too. After all, I was on the way thatvery moment to have my hair cut at the only barbershop in thearea that would cut hair like mine—curly, nappy hair. The kindthat “didn’t move,” the kind of hair that disqualified me from gettingcuts at the white barbershop two blocks from my house. But thiswoman was talking to me.

“Just ignore her,” my mother said, and finally we drove away. ButI couldn’t drive that woman’s angry face out of my head. She hadsomehow stripped me of myself, taken something from me. I felt Ihad to protect myself from ever feeling that kind of loss again.

When I stepped into the barbershop that day and every secondSaturday afterward, I was extra careful to pay attention to the otherblack boys sitting inside, some with their uncles, some with theirfathers and brothers, some sitting all alone. These boys becamelike models to me. I studied their postures and their screwfaces,the unlaced purple and turquoise Filas on their feet, their mannerisms,the way they slapped hands in the street. These boys wouldnever be singled out and dissed the way I had been. I decided Iwanted whatever it was that protected them.

Inside Unisex, it smelled deliciously of witch hazel and Barbasol,and there were three long rows of cushioned seats facing fiveswiveling barber’s chairs like bleachers in a gymnasium. Therewas an old, fake-wood-paneled color television suspended fromthe ceiling in the far back corner. If a bootlegged movie wasn’tplaying on the VCR, the TV stayed stuck on one channel in particularthe rest of the time, a channel I soon learned was called BlackEntertainment Television. At the time in the morning when I usua...