Black Card Page 3

  “What’s up, Dad? I brought some guests. They’re gonna crash here tonight,” said JJ.

  “OK, then,” said Dad.

  When he stood to shake hands, he tottered over the beer cans at his feet like a movie monster over a model city. He turned to JJ’s little brother and said, “You ain’t gonna say hello?”

  The kid nodded, “’Sup,” the shadow under his ball cap shortening to reveal a constellation of zits.

  “Aw, he’s mad because he’s grounded tonight and has to hang out with his pop,” said the father.

  The kid’s brim went down and his face disappeared.

  JJ made a couple trips to a pool house shed, passing out folded lawn chairs, then opening a mini-fridge and underhanding us beers. He opened the last one with the pointer finger of the hand that was holding it, then curled it up to drink as he hopped onto a red picnic table on the far side of the pool. A volley of pops filled the night as we opened our beers, too.

  I checked for a text from Mona and the dad gave my phone a long look. I put it back in my pocket and he swept his eyes over us, “Y’all gonna catch some surf tomorrow?”

  “We weren’t planning on it. Might hit the beach, though,” Mason said.

  Dad nodded approval and burped into the top of his fist.

  “You surf a lot, JJ?” I asked, and my voice echoed off the water in the pool between us. I’d never surfed before, and I live up to one black stereotype: I’m a horrible swimmer.

  “When the waves aren’t too shitty,” he answered.

  The kid piped up, “Imma go tomorrow. JJ, can I borrow your board? Mine’s cracked.”

  “If you don’t get that thing fixed, you’re gonna sink like a nigger in the water,” rumbled Dad.

  Father and sons had roostery southern drawls, mixed with a surfer’s long vowels. “Nigger” came out in three syllables, “Nee-yuh-gir,” and it traveled across the pool loud enough to knock me back in my chair.

  After a whole life in the south, I was still shocked when I heard white people use that word. And this guy had said it loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Did the neighbors say “nigger” too? Casually, in small talk?

  I could see them meeting on the driveway while picking up the morning newspaper.

  “Good morning, Tom. Let’s see what’s happening in the world today,” the father would say.

  “Mornin’. I wonder if there’s any nigger news in the Metro section,” the neighbor would answer, unsheathing the paper from its plastic sleeve.

  “Must be. Niggers are always up to something,” the father would say, padding his way back into the house in black bedroom slippers with stuffed, red-mouthed Sambo heads over the toes.

  The kid didn’t miss a beat and shouted, “Shit, Dad. I swim better’n a nigger, and you know it!”

  Lucius was to my right, sitting stock still like a cat about to pounce. I hid my eyes by looking at the rippling pool water, feeling my bandmates’ attention turning toward me like it was my job to say something; seeing Tim and JJ fidgeting, probably worried that the cool out-of-town guys would tell everyone that their band was racist; JJ’s eyes shifting until he finally says, “Y’all. Come on.”

  The dad looked up. “What? We boring you?”

  “We’ve got guests.”

  “Oh, we embarrassing you?” said the dad, belly straining his half open shirt when he leaned back to drain his drink.

  JJ just sighed and looked down. I wondered how many years it took for him to realize it was wrong for his dad to say “nigger.” Or even how his pop explained to him that they could talk like that at home, but not at the supermarket. I doubted his dad was trying out the n-word for the first time this night.

  I felt sorry for JJ. I also didn’t trust him anymore and set my beer down at the same time that JJ’s dad told the little brother, “And don’t think I didn’t hear you cussing. Watch your mouth, ’less you want another night at home.”

  I was pissed off and scared at being stuck behind a tall fence with a couple of bigots, wondering what would change if I popped out of my chair and yelled, “I’m black, dammit. Where do you get off talking like that?”

  If they said, “Sorry, we didn’t know,” it would make things worse. Then my suspicions would be confirmed; that so many white folks had a moment at parties when they scanned the room before getting all racial.

  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.”

  SIX

  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 racist? What’ll that do?” He scanned the room and quietly said, “Hicks are hicks.”

  I didn’t like hearing more justifications coming from someone else’s mouth. I didn’t like that I didn’t think to ask Russell what he should have done.

  Mason handed me a drink and said, “We might as well enjoy something tonight.”

  I clammed up. Mason only cares about getting famous, and that makes me not trust him. As I took my first sip of what had probably been our gas money, the song ended and the KJ took the mic. He was overweight, with a baseball cap puffed up on his head and aviator-style glasses.

  “That was ‘Goodbye, Earl,’” he said, and his tone reminded me of when guys argue about sports. “Next up, we have a little CCR.”

  A guy with thinning hair and a black mustache skidded up, grinning, and took the mic. A synth version of the guitar lick from “Fortunate Son” booped and beeped through the speakers and he twisted his wrist like he was revving a muscle car’s ignition. A table of folks near the door hooted. It was clear that he sang this song every dang week.

  Some more booze. I could feel Lucius across the room, sliding his thumb across the edge of my Black Card, waiting for me to redeem myself. I palmed the binder of songs. I knew what I was gonna do.

  SEVEN

  After fifteen minutes, most of which were occupied by a very sincere ’70s rock power ballad from a very divorced-looking guy, the KJ stepped back up. “And next we have ‘It’s Tricky,’ by Run-DMC.”

  Run-DMC’s Raising Hell was my first record. One afternoon, I saw guys rapping about math on a kids’ TV show. The next day in my third-grade class, I was talking about how awesome it was, when this white girl named Claire, who wore hoop earrings and was preternaturally cool for an eight-year-old, said, “Oh, you like rap? Do you like DMC?”

  I put down my safety scissors that didn’t cut, briefly wondered if DMC was the nation’s capital, then said, “I don’t know.”

  “They’re rap.” She smiled. “My babysitter plays their tape.”

  I was distraught at the idea of someone knowing about something cool before me. It was my first moment of geeky jealousy. I had to hear this rap group.

  That night over dinner, I asked my father if he’d heard DMC. He chewed spaghetti. “Hmm, no.”

  And I learned that there was music out there that even Dad, of the infinite records, couldn’t play me.

  Later that week, I came home from school and the first thing I saw, propped up on the table in the hall, was this purple-and-green record with two black guys in leather jackets and gangster fedoras on the cover. The guy on the left wore big square glasses and deadpanned the camera, like he’d just made his point and dared you to disagree. The guy on the right had his eyes down, a swing in his stride, nodding, “Mmm hmm,” to back up the guy in the glasses.

  What were they talking about?

  Dad swooped in from the kitchen and led me over to the stereo, balanced by the living room window on a stack of particleboard crates. “They’re not just called DMC,” he said. “They’re called Run-DMC. I guess that’s their names.”

  “Which one is DMC?” I asked.

  Dad was already sliding the record out of the sleeve and into his rough brown hands. “I don’t know. The clerk didn’t tell me that.”

  He put the needle down and it was just two voices, louder than I was allowed to speak at home. The first guy shouted, “Now Peter Piper picked peppers,” then the other guy chimed in, “But Run write rhymes.”

  They went back and forth a couple more times, then these big drums with bells kicked in. Dad moved to block the record player, a habit from years earlier when I’d dance to kids’ music.

  I was into it. I’d like to imagine that I started perfectly pop-locking, but I probably just flailed. Grade school me was mad skinny, and let’s start at the top: red mulatto ’fro, untouched by the new hairbrush on my dresser; giant tortoiseshell glasses kinda like DMC’s; a pocket T-shirt, probably turquoise; sweatpants with knee patches; and tie-dyed Chuck Taylors picked by my hippie mother. I was a wild-looking geek.

  My mom and I had already bonded over funny books and sticky craft projects at the dining room table, but Run-DMC showed me how interested Dad was when I talked about music. They were the impetus for me asking for my own record player, and Dad pulling his old one from the attic. The beginning of seeking black art, wanting it to teach me lessons about myself.

  After a week, I could recite the lyrics to my favorite song, “It’s Tricky,” a capella, but even after years of playing music in front of people, I was nauseated, scared to do it in this bar.

  The following things could go down:

  1. My high school could assemble for an early reunion and clown me for rapping white, inspiring Lucius to borrow scissors from the bartender and cut my Black Card into long, curly strips.

  2. Some rap-hating white guy in overalls could lynch me out back, then Lucius would catch me swinging and slip my Black Card back into my pocket.

  3. A scene from a trite comedy, where uptight old people dance to rap, and a grandma character declares something like, “When I get home, I’m going to have Fred put it in his mouth!”

  4. I could channel my nerves into an enthusiastic performance where I assert my blackness by karaokeing a rap song, but get ignored by a bar full of middle-aged white folks.

  5. I could just do it, and be black. Which I am. Sorta. Or was.

  The spotlight made the short stage a boxing ring.

  Holding the mic on the other side of his gut, the KJ stopped me with a hand on my arm and said, “Keep it clean, now.”

  I told him, “I’ll stick to what’s on the monitor.”

  He handed me the mic and disappeared into shadow, followed by the rest of the bar. When Paper Fire played earlier, the whole room took a deep breath as we counted off our first song. Here, there was chatter, and a woman laughing separate syllables, “Haw . . . Haw . . . Haw . . .” over the clink of glasses.

  I eyed the torso-high blue screen floating a yard to my right. The first lyrics appeared in white, “This speech is my recital / I think it’s very vital.” There were four beats of shakers redone in dinky MIDI then I started rapping, as, letter by letter, beat by beat, the words turned yellow on the screen. I heard my voice echoing through the PA, deep and sorta nasal, always with a touch of smartassedness, a southern softness in the vowels, sounding white? Black? Maybe both or neither, like a newscaster.

  I couldn’t see the crowd, but they’d gone quiet. I stared into the glare, rapping the lyrics that I’d memorized years before, remembering the green rug of my old bedroom, the neighbor’s cream-colored house as seen through the window above the spinning record. As the music faded, I churned butter with my arms, doing a quick Cabbage Patch dance, and the room burst into applause.