I guess we should take that as a warning, Alan said.
No, James said, and he coughed, politely, to keep from laughing. I’m not here as a warning. Not to you.
He was a Muslim, though he rarely discussed it; not Nation of Islam, but NBIM, which, he told me once, stood for New Baltimore Integrated Mosque, a special congregation where Arabs and Pakistanis and black people all worshipped together. Occasionally, if I arrived early enough, I found him doing morning prayers outside in the empty lot next to the food pantry’s row house. Inshallah, he always said, when we talked about how many bags we’d distribute that day, and Alan and I started doing it, too, as a joke, first, and then without thinking. Inshallah, we could sell fifteen T-shirts. Inshallah, if you get into Wesleyan.
It happened to be in the same moment that I came to know James that I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X for the first time, and came upon the rapper Paris, who referred casually to blue-eyed devils and sons of Yacub, as if talking about his uncle Bill from Indiana. At the Black Cat bookstore on Read Street, I found copies of The Final Call and the New Afrikan Party Newsletter, and sat reading, for an entire Sunday afternoon, one column of tiny print after another, mesmerized by explanations of how the downfall of White Amerikkka could be predicted by the phases of the sun, how school health clinics and Planned Parenthood were agents of genocide, how black people could use shea butter to boost their natural immunity to AIDS.
There was something refreshing about being called a devil. This was in 1991, at the very peak of the crack wars, when Baltimore was Murder Capital for the first time; I had just gotten my license, and I drove myself, alone, or sometimes with Alan, down to the food pantry twice or three times a week, and the fact of being independent changed everything I saw, as if I had to own the city for the first time, having to find my own parking spaces in it. It wasn’t a matter of fear, though I carried Mace with me everywhere, wore my wallet and keys on a biker chain, and checked the backseat and trunk of the car religiously, as carjackers were known to put a gun to your head from behind as you drove. What astonished me was how easily I could slip past the box hedges and pin oaks of Roland Park, the Victorians and Colonials and Tudors prim and quiet, and into the derelict corridors, the bombed-out storefronts, the vacants, the dealers in puffy jackets standing sentry on every corner, the Korean liquor stores with armored grates and triple-thick glass in front of the register. This was a drive of ten minutes. It is still, come to think of it, a drive of ten minutes. This geography, I thought, was a crime. Someone had given me a postcard of Proudhon that I taped to my locker: Property is theft. How could it be anything else? How could I be anything other than a criminal, by the fact of my pimply existence?
I even started doing it with Alan. If gay people could be queers, what was the harm? What up, devil? I said to him once, within James’s earshot, and James turned around.
Did you just say what I think you said?
You’re right, Alan said. It’s not funny.
You don’t hear me calling anyone around here a nigger, do you?
You could if you wanted to.
Thanks, James said. Thanks for giving your permission.
That’s not what I meant—
Lookit here, he snapped. We got a job to do. I watched, so clearly, as all his affection for us folded up in his face like a fan. No names, no name-calling.
Well, we are, aren’t we?
Aren’t we what?
Aren’t we the devil? I mean, aren’t we the problem?
He shrugged.
Choose, he said. Be the devil if you want. What you are right now is a pain in my ass who can’t sort tomatoes worth a damn. This look ripe to you? Get back to your job, okay? Just do your job.
—
In October of the following year, our senior year, James was shot twice in the head in his apartment above the food pantry, and the building was torched; when I drove down, that same afternoon, it was still smoking, wound around with police tape, and the roof had caved in. It reminded me of photographs of the ruins of Europe in the Second World War. I recognized one of our weekly clients, Dawson, wheeling a shopping cart filled with neatly sorted bags of beer bottles and aluminum cans. Hell, he said, you didn’t know? Motherfucker was selling drugs out of there the whole time. Wednesday through Friday, when the pantry was closed. Went in there one time myself, see if I could get me some extra cans of beans. Didn’t want none of those kinds of beans, feel me? Yeah, he had a good thing going there for a while.
I don’t believe it, I said.
Then forget it, he said. Forget I said anything. Don’t matter now, do it? Still dead. Still fucked it up for the rest of us. Got to go down to Jonah House now, stand in line.
I’ll give you a ride, I said. It felt, obscurely, like being at the end of a TV movie; I was supposed to have learned something. I was supposed to be changed. Black people’s lives, I should have said, facing the camera, are no more expressive of statistics than anyone else’s. Who am I, who are you, to go looking in this horror for a pattern?
Naw, Dawson said. Can’t leave the cart.
Put it in the trunk.
Everything’s going to turn out all right, he said, pushing away from me. Trust in the Lord. You hear me?
—
When I went to college I snapped out of my love of hip-hop, as if out of a dream. Someone looked at my tape collection and laughed. Who are you supposed to be, homeboy? I dumped them all in a box and began buying CDs instead — Pavement, The Spinanes, Stereolab, Liz Phair. I grew a goatee, developed a taste for expensive coffee, read Baudrillard and John Ashbery, read Ginsberg and Williams and Pound, read Rexroth and Kerouac and D. T. Suzuki, and began getting up at seven-thirty for daily Chinese classes.
Was I fleeing from something? Was I certain why I loved this new language, with its four tones and eighty thousand characters, its unshakable alienness, its irreconcilability with any language, any world, I knew? Is that even a question? Did any of us know why, given all our advantages, our entitlements, our good study habits and chemically inflated self-esteem, we were still so prone to spastic fits of despair, why we sought out more and more exotic ways of getting high, why we wore Sanskrit rings and tribal tattoos, salon-styled dreadlocks and Japanese see-through raincoats? How could it be running away, when it was nothing more than running in place? How could it be guilt, when the air was so thick with good intentions, with accusations and counteraccusations?
All I know is this: when I came home, I never went downtown. I tore my Illmatic poster off my bedroom wall and used the back for calligraphy practice. In a fit of orderly pique, I carted off the contents of my high school bookcase—Invisible Man, Native Son, The Fire Next Time, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Soul Brother, Black Like Me, Black Ice, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings—to the Salvation Army. I waited, listening, for the thunderclap, the world splitting open under my feet, and heard only the tinkling of the Good Humor truck down the block, the moan of Mr. Takematsu’s aging lawn mower over the backyard fence. I thought of my parents’ earnest faces, of my father, clean-shaven, playing the guitar for my kindergarten class—If I had a hammer, I’d hammer out danger… I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land—and their sententious, balsamic-sprinkling, Chablis-swilling, late middle age, their faces puckered with concern over the prospect that I would go off to China and become a mercenary investment banker. How vicious and unfair to blame them for my lack of imagination, with the short and pathetic half-life of my good intentions! When all I wanted, all any of us wanted, was to go back to that childlike state, hand-holding, faces raised to the words of the beatific saint, promising us that this story, like all good stories, had an ending, that everything was going to be okay.