didn’t. Well, not much, anyway.
And you think that makes it okay?
Just because you’re not listening to it doesn’t mean it’s not out there, I said. Wouldn’t you rather know?
What, this is supposed to be my direct line from the ghetto?
Chuck D says hip-hop is the black world’s CNN.
You’re not the black world. You’re not
black
, don’t you get it? And listening to this shit doesn’t change that. It just makes you a parasite. It would be one thing if you actually
knew
any black people. And I don’t count.
That’s really fair. You get to be the authority, but yet you don’t count.
You don’t get to decide what’s fair, she said. Don’t you understand? She ejected the tape, before I could stop her, and flipped it into the backseat, among the Subway wrappers and 7-Eleven coffee cups, the broken microphone stand, and the guitar-string envelopes. You get toshut up, she said. That’s your special job. You get to not have rights for a change. Shut up and go away and leave black people
alone
, for once.
—
I didn’t listen. Or maybe, in some sense, I did.
At Willow, in place of community service, we had what we called
volunteer jobs
, assigned by the principal’s office, six hours a week minimum. And the black people I knew in any true sense—any real recognition, any actual conversation—were all from my VJ shifts downtown: soup kitchen, sophomore year; food pantry, junior year; community health clinic, senior year. Mostly my supervisors were solemn, tight-mouthed men, ex-cons, Vietnam vets, halfway-house residents, who hardly bothered to learn my name; but there were always others, who asked why I wore my hair that way, who wanted to know how many hours of community service I’d been sentenced to, and what I’d done to deserve it; who offered me menthol cigarettes, which I graciously, nauseously accepted, who told me something about doing a month in the hole at Lorton, or being shot out of a helicopter in Khe Sanh.
And then there was James, a category of his own. James supervised a whole crew of prep school do-gooders—PSDGs, that was his term—at the Belinda Matthews Memorial Food Pantry on Saturday mornings, teaching us how to process a hundred pounds of cast-off lettuce, how to stack boxes of government cheese, how to load a shopping bag so it wouldn’t split. He stood a head taller than most of us, six-five, in an army jacket, with a shining bald dome, a crocheted skullcap, and a silvery soul patch, like an aging hero from a Melvin Van Peebles movie. He told us he’d been in the same City College class with Kurt Schmoke, then the mayor; after that, he’d turned down a scholarship to Howard, traveled the country playing bass in an R&B band, and spent some time with the Peoples Temple in California, years before Jonestown. But I knew, even then, he said, more than once, I knew thatJim Jones was a crazy motherfucker. It was well
known
that he would screw anything that moved, anybody that came within ten feet. Man or woman. That was how he did it, you know. Everybody felt dirty. Everybody was compromised. Closer you get, the more compromised. So I packed my bags and got out of that scene.
And then what? Alan once asked him. We were on the same shift, in the fall of our junior year; we’d go straight from pitching rotten tomatoes to band practice. What’d you do then, after Jim Jones? How’d you get back to Baltimore?
James palmed a cantaloupe from a wax-board crate, sniffed it, like a chef looking for the peak of ripeness. Son, he said, looking straight at Alan, I did cocaine. Nothing but cocaine for fifteen years. You hear? Bought, sold, sniffed, ate, shot up, smoked, stuck it on my gums, stuck it up my ass once, I was that desperate. Took it into prison with me, took it right up to the moment I left. Fifteen years in the white mountains. Six of them in jail. Then I found God, and here we are.
I guess we should take that as a warning, Alan said.
No, James said, and he coughed,
And you think that makes it okay?
Just because you’re not listening to it doesn’t mean it’s not out there, I said. Wouldn’t you rather know?
What, this is supposed to be my direct line from the ghetto?
Chuck D says hip-hop is the black world’s CNN.
You’re not the black world. You’re not
black
, don’t you get it? And listening to this shit doesn’t change that. It just makes you a parasite. It would be one thing if you actually
knew
any black people. And I don’t count.
That’s really fair. You get to be the authority, but yet you don’t count.
You don’t get to decide what’s fair, she said. Don’t you understand? She ejected the tape, before I could stop her, and flipped it into the backseat, among the Subway wrappers and 7-Eleven coffee cups, the broken microphone stand, and the guitar-string envelopes. You get toshut up, she said. That’s your special job. You get to not have rights for a change. Shut up and go away and leave black people
alone
, for once.
—
I didn’t listen. Or maybe, in some sense, I did.
At Willow, in place of community service, we had what we called
volunteer jobs
, assigned by the principal’s office, six hours a week minimum. And the black people I knew in any true sense—any real recognition, any actual conversation—were all from my VJ shifts downtown: soup kitchen, sophomore year; food pantry, junior year; community health clinic, senior year. Mostly my supervisors were solemn, tight-mouthed men, ex-cons, Vietnam vets, halfway-house residents, who hardly bothered to learn my name; but there were always others, who asked why I wore my hair that way, who wanted to know how many hours of community service I’d been sentenced to, and what I’d done to deserve it; who offered me menthol cigarettes, which I graciously, nauseously accepted, who told me something about doing a month in the hole at Lorton, or being shot out of a helicopter in Khe Sanh.
And then there was James, a category of his own. James supervised a whole crew of prep school do-gooders—PSDGs, that was his term—at the Belinda Matthews Memorial Food Pantry on Saturday mornings, teaching us how to process a hundred pounds of cast-off lettuce, how to stack boxes of government cheese, how to load a shopping bag so it wouldn’t split. He stood a head taller than most of us, six-five, in an army jacket, with a shining bald dome, a crocheted skullcap, and a silvery soul patch, like an aging hero from a Melvin Van Peebles movie. He told us he’d been in the same City College class with Kurt Schmoke, then the mayor; after that, he’d turned down a scholarship to Howard, traveled the country playing bass in an R&B band, and spent some time with the Peoples Temple in California, years before Jonestown. But I knew, even then, he said, more than once, I knew thatJim Jones was a crazy motherfucker. It was well
known
that he would screw anything that moved, anybody that came within ten feet. Man or woman. That was how he did it, you know. Everybody felt dirty. Everybody was compromised. Closer you get, the more compromised. So I packed my bags and got out of that scene.
And then what? Alan once asked him. We were on the same shift, in the fall of our junior year; we’d go straight from pitching rotten tomatoes to band practice. What’d you do then, after Jim Jones? How’d you get back to Baltimore?
James palmed a cantaloupe from a wax-board crate, sniffed it, like a chef looking for the peak of ripeness. Son, he said, looking straight at Alan, I did cocaine. Nothing but cocaine for fifteen years. You hear? Bought, sold, sniffed, ate, shot up, smoked, stuck it on my gums, stuck it up my ass once, I was that desperate. Took it into prison with me, took it right up to the moment I left. Fifteen years in the white mountains. Six of them in jail. Then I found God, and here we are.
I guess we should take that as a warning, Alan said.
No, James said, and he coughed,
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