Jay-Z’s doing it, Paul says. The whole global brand thing. You look at the numbers for Rocawear, sixty percent’s overseas.
Yeah, Martin says. Jay-Z, that’s one model. But it’s so much more than that.
He takes a long sip of iced tea, dabs his lips with a still-folded napkin.
So? Marshall asks.
So? You want me to give away all my trade secrets?
Don’t be paranoid, Bill Gates, Paul says. We’re not in your business.
Everyone’s going to be in my business eventually. But look, that’s beside the point. What I’m saying, now, is, we need more brothers looking overseas for opportunities. It’s a big world full of very small niches.
You know what he does for a living? Marshall asks me. Has he told you what he sells?
Martin exchanges a glance with me across the table.
Electronics, I say. Specialized electronics. I’m not an expert—
Oh, come on, he hasn’t given you the sales pitch yet? He sells unlocked cell phones. Open-platform computers. Self-replicating proxy servers. Isn’t that right? What do you call it, spyware?
Not spyware. He shrugs. Geekware, maybe. Stuff people want so that they can get around Microsoft and Verizon. I don’t even understand some of it myself. I have a technical lady out in Mountainview who handles that. Me, I just do the buying and selling. It’s low-volume, big-margin sales. My customers are the kind of rich techies who want all the latest gadgets, prototypes, the stuff you can only get over in Asia, but they want it sold to them by somebody who speaks American, who operates with a friendly face. They want to have a guy. A hookup. Whatever. I’m not saying it’s easy money, but it’s not exactly the salt mines, either. Eventually, when the brand’s established, I’ll sell out and move on. I’m into business, not a business. If I could tell one thing to the kids at Dunbar, it’s that. Capital flows. Always be on the move.
That Zig Ziglar shit, Lee says. Always be selling. You can get it off a motivational poster.
No, Martin says, carefully, it’s not that. I’m not talking some self-esteem crap. And I’m not just talking about money. Success is more than money.
Power, then. Influence.
Connectedness, he says. To be intractable. Undismissable. Visible.
You writing this down? Paul asks me. Or do you just have one of those automatic, photographic memories?
Marshall fixes me with a newly interested look.
You know, he says to Martin, it must be nice to have a Boswell. An amanuensis. That’s seriously old school. I should look into getting one myself.
You lost me, Lee says. Ama-what?
Amanuensis, Martin says. Someone who follows you around and writes down everything you say. I could sell you one, you know. A digital voice recorder. I’ve got one the size of a toothpick for a hundred ninety-nine.
Hear that? Marshall turns to me. You’re superannuated, he says, with shining eyes, a pretense of malice that is itself malicious. You’re fired. Go home.
7
I’m going to say something here that should come as no surprise, at least not to those of my generation, born after the civil rights movement had shrunk to pages 263–67 of American Panoramas, and raised, for the most part, in the Eighties, watching Bill Cosby sell Pudding Pops on TV: my education in blackness, in the experience of black people in America, began one hot summer afternoon in 1989, in sticky-floored Theater C at the Chestnut Hill Mall 13, with Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.
Of course I had heard rap before. I knew, in a kind of academic way, what a crack addict was, and I knew a great deal about Martin Luther King: my parents’ first date was at the March on Washington in 1963. But in the world I lived in before I moved to Baltimore — Newton, Massachusetts, not Boston, unless you count the occasional trip to the Aquarium or Faneuil Hall — the only black people I saw regularly were babysitters and maids. My parents were ardent Democrats, classic northeastern Waspy liberals, who nonetheless, characteristically, chose to live in a neighborhood populated with people exactly like themselves — plus a margin of Chinese, Indian, Thai, and garden-variety reform Ashkenazim — for the schools, the parks, the playgrounds, the excellent restaurants.
Of course it wasn’t Alabama, it wasn’t 1955; there were always a few black kids, a photogenic sprinkling. Tiffany and Wesley Roberts, whose father was Duane Roberts, the Celtics point guard, were one year ahead of me at Passing Brook Elementary. Tiffany was grasshopper-legged, a natural sprinter, an indefatigable four-square champion; Wesley spent recesses under the pines at the far end of the soccer field, trading stickers, buttons, Garbage Pail Kids, baseball cards, Dungeons & Dragons imaginary weapons — whatever currency of the moment.
That was where I came to know him, briefly, in third grade, before his dad was traded to the SuperSonics. He sat hunched over, legs folded, stretching out the hem of his long T-shirt like a table, displaying some treasure — a folder of Reggie Jackson cards from every season, a Don Mattingly rookie card, a mint Topps pack of the 1979 Pirates — and daring the rest of us to make an offer. It wasn’t fun, exactly, being so utterly outmatched, but Wesley knew how to work the margins, trading cards he didn’t need for the best we had to offer. He stared into space, over our shoulders, reciting statistics in a listless, deadpan voice, showing why his cards were always worth more, had more long-term potential; he used words like investment and dividends. Today we might give him a diagnosis — Asperger’s, mild autism, social anxiety disorder — but no one at the time, as far as I can recall, saw anything wrong. Never did anyone in that circle refer to him as black. Creatures of instinct, we didn’t care about the color of his skin, or the content of his character; we cared about his stuff. Only later did it occur to me that that was why he sought us out, and perhaps why he became — I Googled him once, in idle curiosity, a few years ago — a venture capitalist seeding start-ups and then selling them to Microsoft. He’s grown into his looks now; he and his father have a foundation together that runs after-school sports programs in Seattle.
—
This was the life I was raised to have, racially speaking, the life my parents had, post-1973, when they left Back Bay for the suburbs: the life of a Good White Person. I was meant to have a few, select, black friends — peers, confidants, individuals — a number of acquaintances, business associates, secretaries, hygienists, a few charities, to which I would give generously, as much as possible, and a broad, sympathetic, detached view of the continuing struggles of African Americans to achieve the long-delayed goals of full civic participation, low birth rates, ascension to the middle glass, hiring equity, educational parity, and so, so, so, on, on, on. I was supposed to live with the frisson of guilt that comes from owning an expensive, elaborate security system, and to mention, at parties, that rates of incarceration for black males are six times the national average. I was supposed to organize for Obama, and own at least ten separate items of Obama paraphernalia, and proudly display my Yes We Did postcard on my refrigerator for all of 2009 and 2010, and feel that slow-fading flush of warmth and exultation, as if someone had reached out and grasped my hand, and held it, a squeeze as a substitute for an embrace. This was the life, until a few weeks ago, that I thought I was having. I should have known better.