These things are always so stupid when armed with hindsight, but in the moment it seems like all your existence converges in a moment, is out there on the table, and your options are limited. This day, I had a paper due. It was finished but late, and my entire English grade was held in the balance of getting it in. I was in my history class, a period before lunch, when it happened. My teacher was Mr. Stoddard, the sort of liberal white guy who showed us Ken Burns’s Civil War and took a whole period to discuss the impact of Rodney King. I was a fan, and took great pleasure in our back-and-forth. This morning, we were debating the morality of the American Army and the recently concluded Desert Storm. Most of the class went with the country and argued for both. But I was black as Edmondson Avenue and AFRAM, and stood my solo ground. I wouldn’t fight in any American Army against anyone close to my color.
What came next must have been simple clowning, the sort of comment a kid would yell out because he had nothing to offer except the possibility of sparking a good laugh. When I said I would not fight for America, skinny Shawn yelled from the back—
That’s cause you a punk.
He got no laughter, but I felt an old burning in my chest. No one at Poly had ever said anything like that to me. I’d been tested a couple times, but I’d learned how to walk, when to smile, not talk too much, and though I lacked an ill pedigree, I still looked like a kid who knew the rules. I turned around, at the time not knowing who said what, and yelled in typical sixteen-year-old fashion—
Whoever said that ain’t going say it to my face.
The class was absorbed by all the instigating ooohs, and Mr. Stoddard took control and calmed everyone down. But after class my nigger Brady told me it was Shawn who’d made the crack, and this made it worse. He was out of Fallstaff, the softest middle school in the city, where in my hated weaker days, I’d thought I wanted to attend. Shawn was a joker to me, would sit in the back of the class with a stupid grin, dressed like Kwamé. Whatever, I told Brady. Shawn don’t want nothing to do with me.
But a few minutes later, Brady returned, hyping up the whole affair, Yo, Shawn said he want to see you. He said you could see him in the bathroom right outside the cafeteria at lunch.
I walked down with five or six other boys, all hyped on my own scent, and found him standing there with his best friend, Tyrone. I started barking soon as I walked.
Nigger, you wanna see me? You got something you wanna say to me, mutherfucker? What’s up, nigger? What’s up?
He was not so much afraid as stunned by the vehemence of things. We had never beefed before, and here I was off, one inane comment escalating and lobbying for war. Neither of us was built like that, the exploding of fists was unnatural to us, only adopted when it was felt that something precious was at stake. But I was of my time, and this was it. Painfully I’d come to know that face must be held against everything, that flagrant dishonor follows you, haunting every handshake with all your niggers, disputing every advance on a jenny. Shawn was, at first, true to his better nature, and backed down and held up open hands. But I’d come too far to be gracious. I stuck my finger in his grill—
That’s right. ’Cause you a bitch-ass nigger.
— and walked out.
Nowadays, I cut on the tube and see the dumbfounded looks, when over some minor violation of name and respect, a black boy is found leaking on the street. The anchors shake their heads. The activists give their stupid speeches, praising mythical days when all disputes were handled down at Ray’s Gym. Politicians step up to the mic, claim the young have gone mad, their brains infected, and turned superpredator. Fuck you all who’ve ever spoken so foolishly, who’ve opened your mouths like we don’t know what this is. We have read the books you own, the scorecards you keep — done the math and emerged prophetic. We know how we will die — with cousins in double murder suicides, in wars that are mere theory to you, convalescing in hospitals, slowly choked out by angina and cholesterol. We are the walking lowest rung, and all that stands between us and beast, between us and the local zoo, is respect, the respect you take as natural as sugar and shit. We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed for us.
I was sitting at the lunch table, shooting that Shawn ain’t shit, when he ran out, and wiped my memory. Who knows what his boy told him in that bathroom after we left, what stories and taunts he used to hype him into frenzy? What he knew was that something had been stolen from him, not by the local badass but some kid in contacts who was barely king of himself. Later, they told me he ran out screaming, the steel trash can above his head, and when it landed it boomed so loud that the whole cafeteria turned. That I crumpled to the white bench, and said nothing. That he dropped the can, held his hands over his head like Sweet Pea Whitaker, and started to dance. That he was off in a dreamworld, his honor restored, and my own stolen, added to his. That his back was turned when I rose up, and unfurled the green David Banner. That I grabbed him from behind, slammed him onto the white tabletop, and climbed up.
That was when I returned to myself, and what I felt was not pain but a sick power. What I wanted was to banish this kid to the prosthetics ward, to turn his whole grill piece into a project for surgeons. I pinned him on top of the table and swung with both hands. To the right I saw one of Kier’s old girls yelling — Ta-Nehisi, Ta-Nehisi! Stop! But I was time traveling back to the days at Lemmel and all the razors I’d swallowed for ignorance of rules. Now it all flew back out, and though I was aware, I felt an enveloping rage, as my hands were lifted from the controls.
I was pulled back by two of my more responsible friends who were above the howling and instigation. I touched the side of my face and saw red on fingers.
Yo, what did he hit me with? What the fuck did he throw at me? A juice?
Naw, man, he hit you with a trash can.
I’ma kill that nigger.
I started rushing back his way, but they grabbed me and took me up to the office. I was a mess. Vice principals and secretaries gasped. Someone called the ambulance. My buddies got early dismissal. There was blood all over their clothes. Dad met me at the hospital.
He was about as comforting as I can ever remember him in all our time in that house, which meant asking if I was okay and not saying much on the ride home. But I didn’t need comfort. I felt, for the first time, what I wished I had felt years ago, that someone had tried to take something from me, that he’d attempted to reduce me to a status below my station. And that I didn’t let it happen.
I came back the next day, staples in my head, but not to laughter and taunts. They said I was the brown bomber, that they’d never seen a nigger lose it like that, and to top it off, Shawn — not me — had been expelled from school. I reveled for a week. Jennys from freshman year stepped to me, flush with vapors, and I was king until I started rifling through my backpack. My English paper was gone. I had lost it in the commotion.
That year, I tried to turn it around. But everything caught up with me. All my past failures from years before heaped onto my two assaults on teachers, to my fight in the cafeteria, and to my failing of English, and I was banished for good. My parents could not intercede here. My father was sitting in the living room on our gray sectional couch, and this is how I knew it was over. He wasn’t even angry. He just sat there blank and went into a speech from which I only remember one line—
Ta-Nehisi, you are a disgrace to this family’s name.
That hurt, and not because, before my father, mostly Coates had meant alcoholic, and orphaned kids. Because my father was Superman, the dude who pushed through Murphy Homes in search of Bill, the cat who was dealt a hand of seven kids by four women, and did his best to carry it, and I had completely let him down. But more than that was how I’d failed myself. No matter what the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail.