Nique slapped his hand against the wall in frustration. “That’s because it was a rhetorical statement, Moves. Don’t you dare try to pretend you didn’t know that.”
“This is gonna be a disaster, isn’t it?” asked Macon, stomach sinking as he acknowledged what he’d always kind of known.
“Hell yeah. Question is how we’re gonna spin it.”
“You think they’ll even show up for the rally?”
“To kick your ass, if nothing else,” said Nique. “When black folks start rebuffing their ever-so-sincere attempts to shoulder the burden, crackers gonna want some get-back.”
“You know,” said Andre, bright-voiced, “that crew was the worst of the worst. Maybe productive exchanges are taking place in office buildings and on stoops throughout the city.”
“You think?”
Andre shrugged. “Not really. But it’s possible.”
“Only one way to find out,” said Nique. “Let’s hit the streets. And if you run away again, Moves, I’ma put my foot so far up your ass the water in my knee will quench your thirst. You’re the goddamn captain, you hear me? Your job is to go down with the ship.”
Chapter Eleven
In front of his campaign headquarters in Midtown, Marcell A. “Jackfruit” Preston was busy assuaging white people’s guilt and courting their votes. He stood beneath a large red-white-and-blue banner that, between twin smiling photographs of himself sporting a tuxedo and a New York Giants cap, read HARD WORK, NOT APOLOGIES. Flanked by two young women handing out CONGRESSMAN JACKFRUIT campaign buttons, the candidate pressed the flesh with a long line of white people eager to hear his message.
“Good morning to you, sir,” he said, shaking hands with a pair of business-suited whiteboys on their way to work. “You haven’t done anything wrong, have you? Look like a couple of hardworking, responsible young men to me. Vote Jackfruit for Congress: I believe in hard work, not apologies.”
Twenty flights up from where Jackfruit stood, in the corporate offices of Roderick, Stern and Sons, Attorneys at Law, senior partner Jeffery Roderick buzzed his secretary. “Doris, send in Mr. Dayton, would you?”
A minute later, first-year trial attorney Robert Dayton entered the office, wiping the fatigue of another night’s work out of his eyes. He’d been with the firm only five months, since graduating law school. He was busting his ass to make good, and trying to ignore the feeling that his job was more or less to be paraded into court when the firm thought a black lawyer might appeal to the jury.
“Sit down, Bob,” said Jeffery, “this won’t take long.” Roderick put one foot up on his desk and pressed his fingertips together thoughtfully. “Bob, I want to know . . . do I—do we—do I owe you some sort of an apology? Are we . . .” The senior partner trailed off, collapsed his brow, and made a vague inquisitive gesture by separating and re-pressing his fingertips.
Dayton gulped, feeling his Adam’s apple bulge against the knot of his Brooks Brothers tie. “No, sir,” he said, shaking his head. “No, sir.”
“Ah,” said Roderick, removing his foot from the desk and affecting a grim, leathery smile. “Good. Well then. Thank you, Bob. We really must get together for a drink one of these days. You’re doing fine work, Bob, fine work. Thank you.”
Dayton nodded, smiled, and left his boss’s office. He walked down the hall to the washroom, locked the door, checked to make sure all the stalls were empty, and punched his fist through the mirror that hung over the sink. Shattered glass filled the white porcelain basin and blood spread slowly over his hand. He was careful not to let any of it drip onto his tailored navy suit.
A few blocks farther south, three skinny black fourteen-year-olds stalked through Bryant Park, confronting the low-level corporate-mailroom types who ate their deli-takeout lunches off their laps along the park’s perimeter. The boys halted before an effete white man in his mid-twenties and stood with their legs spread shoulders’ width apart and their hands on their hips. The man continued to eat his tuna sandwich until one of the three plucked the Walkman earplug from the man’s left ear. He looked up at them, frozen in surprise and apprehension, as the tinny strains of Madonna’s “Material Girl” escaped the tiny speaker.
“You got something to say to us?” the boy asked, twirling the wire between his thumb and forefinger.
“Huh?”
“Don’t you want to apologize and shit?”
“For what? What did I do?”
“Man, ain’t you watch the news? Macon Detornay and shit? You s’posed to apologize for oppressing my black ass. Whussup?”
“Um, sorry, I guess,” the man said, tucking his hair behind his ear and crinkling his nose at his tormentors.
“Thank you. You gonna eat that pickle? I demand that pickle as reparations. Whussup?”
“Go ahead.” He raised his hands to his shoulders, leaving the food unprotected in his lap. The boy snatched the pickle and crunched it loudly.
“Word. Now sit here and consider your crimes. Peace.” The three walked off in silence. Ten feet from the site of the pickle-jacking, their solemnity exploded into raucous, back-slapping laughter. They scanned the park for another victim, arguing over who got to go next.
In a downtown office building, Gloria, who was white, was chatting with her best friend, Cynthia, who was black, between cubicles. “This whole Day of Apology thing is pretty stupid, isn’t it?” said Gloria, filing a stack of memos by subject. “I mean, we’re best friends. Our kids play every weekend, we eat lunch together every day. We’re practically the same person.”
Cynthia shuffled a sheaf of papers until they were neat, then stapled them into a packet. “My grandfather’s brother was lynched,” she said quietly, without looking up from her chore. “My great-uncle Jeremiah. For smiling at a white lady. Has anyone in your family ever been lynched?”
“No. But nobody in my family’s ever lynched somebody, either.”
“Has anybody in your family ever stopped a lynching?”
Gloria put down her pen and cocked her head. “Are you mad at me?” she asked.
Cynthia stiffened. “Why should I be mad at you?” She spoke through pursed lips, as if hoping Gloria would know the answer.
Gloria put her hand on her best friend’s arm. “Do you want me to apologize, honey?”
Cynthia was on the verge of tears. “I don’t know,” she said, lip trembling. “I don’t want you to, but I don’t want you not to, either.” She smiled and her raised cheeks forced the tears hanging in the corners of her eyes to fall. “I feel so silly,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
Gloria stood up and hugged her. “It’s okay, baby.” She rubbed Cynthia’s back. “It’s okay.”
On a desolate street corner in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a ghetto so remote you had to take both a bus and a train to get in or out, a dozen white apologists from Colorado were about to shed blood for the cause. They had wandered out of the bus station, glancing left and right at the boarded-up tenements and dingy storefronts, the bodegas and the lone Chinese takeout joint, shrinking from pedestrians pushing baby strollers and junk-piled shopping carts alike, and made it exactly a block and a half before running into trouble.
“What the fuck you want?” asked Teri “Street Sweeper” Framboise, chairwoman of the newly christened Neighborhood Welcoming Committee, poking a length of hollow metal pipe into the narrow chest of an ex-hippie junior-high-school teacher from Boulder who was attempting to shepherd his social studies class through what was shaping up to be the worst field trip ever.
It had seemed so brilliant back in Colorado—sort of a nineties twist on the way he and his acidhead Merry Pranksters–inspired pals had handed flowers to the riot cops and Black Power demonstrators at Berkeley in 1968. Scale the walls of misunderstanding in hiking boots of love, man. Walk right up to those hostile, snarling Negroes and kiss them on the cheek, make them smile, smoke a joint together—defeat racism and subtly one-up the black race at the same time: beat back that sacred black cool with a spastic, dare-to-do-it out-frontness that rendered coolness impotent and silly. How you gonna be cool in the face of Day-Glo freaking free love?
But here they were at the appointed time in the appointed place and things were not going according to plan—what was the plan again? Teri and her crew of stick-up women arrayed themselves in a hexagon around the out-of-towners, toting pipes, machetes, and chain saws like extras from a Naughty by Nature video.
“To say we’re sorry?” the teacher squeaked, tucking his head between his shoulders like a turtle.
“You sure as fuck are,” Teri agreed. “Now strip to your drawers. Macon Detornay ain’t the only person who can rob white people. Put your wallets in the hat, jewelry in the gunnysack, cameras and electronics in the cardboard box. I want two piles of clothing: name-brand gear in one, generic-ass bullshit in the other. Hurry the fuck up before me and my girls get restless and give y’all chain saw lobotomies.”
The vice-president of the chess club was in the midst of asking whether JCPenney counted as a name brand when the crack of a backfiring engine prompted Teri and her troops to hit the dust. A Ford pickup rounded the corner and two men with shotguns leapt from the still-moving vehicle, executing perfect military rolls and landing on one knee with their guns cocked and trained toward Teri.
“All right,” said the one on the right, shoulder muscles bulging from beneath a barbecue-sauce-stained Confederate flag T-shirt, “y’all Negresses drop them home-maintenance tools and git yer hands behind yer heads.”
“Y’all white folks put yer clothes back on an’ jump on in the truck,” said the one on the left, jerking his head at the mud-caked vehicle. He wore a ratty T-shirt adorned with Billie Holiday’s portrait. The social studies class rerobed and headed shakily toward the Ford.
“What these men are doing isn’t right, children,” whispered their teacher, gathering his brood about him, “but say thank you, anyway.”
“Now apologize to the white folks,” demanded the first gunman, still squinting through his scope.
“Fuck you,” said Teri. “I ain’t gonna apologize for shit. Kill me, you cracker motherfucker.” The ex-hippie cringed, plugged his ears, and waited for the blast, reflecting that black people were a foolish, prideful lot.
The vigilantes stared at her and then at one another. “We might need the ammo later, Raymond,” offered the one in the Billie Holiday shirt. “We only brought one box of shells.”
“Yeah,” Raymond concurred, “I reckon we might.” Slowly, the two of them backed away until they stood beside the Ford. Raymond pointed at Teri. “You’re lucky, bitch.” He and his buddy swung themselves into the cab and slammed the door.
“I tell myself that every day,” Teri called after him as the truck rumbled away with the entire social studies class piled onto the flatbed like trophy bucks.
In the East Village, a white backpack rap crew known as the Power of Babble was scouring the record bins of You Ain’t Hip Hop, a vinyl haven run by Brits whose categorical knowledge of the origins of every sample ever used manifested itself as unfettered disdain for any customer less proficient. The prices were stratospheric, but people tended to spend more than they’d planned just to impress the clerks.
“Yo, people need to listen to that nigga Macon, word up,” said MC Tyrannorawness Sex, Power of Babble’s frontman, as he pawed through a stack of pristine 45s. He had earned maximum respect in backpack rap circles by being one of the only whiteboys on the scene to grow legitimate-looking dreadlocks, thanks to the rigorous and ritualistic daily application of beeswax, honey, marzipan, and seven other secret ingredients to his domepiece. As a born-and-raised New Yorker, an MC, and a dread, he felt he had earned the right to say the word
nigga,
although he was careful to use it only as a non-racially specific term roughly equivalent to
dude.
He never said it in front of black people unless he was quoting a song. This, he did often. Not being able to lace his own lyrics with the word was, of course, a great handicap, and probably the reason he had yet to sign a record deal, but Tyrannorawness bore racism’s burden with steadfast dignity.
“True dat,” agreed his DJ, Prosthetic Ed. “That apology shit is the move. Course, he ain’t talkin’ ’bout us. We already down and shit, rye?”
“Oh, no doubt, son.”
Their producer, Profettik, approached from across the store, a slab of vinyl in his raised hand. “Yo, I got the hot shit,” he called. “This joint got the butter loop on it. We gon’ go platinum offa this.”
“Word,” enthused Tyrannorawness. “That A&R nigga from Epicenter been dying to sign some white niggas ever since them Detroit niggas blew up. We ’bout to be in vogue, nigga.” They exchanged pounds, chipped in a Jackson each to cop the record, and caught the 6 train to the Upper East Side to sneak into their prep school’s state-of-the-art electronic music studio and launch their careers.
On their way to the iron horse, they passed a young Dominican man in a wheelchair, parked on the corner of Thirteenth and A with a takeout coffee cup in hand. His $150 Jordans were factory white, having never touched the ground, and their trim matched the red baseball cap twisted backward on his head. The silver-script name chain around his neck read
Edgar.
His coffee cup was empty, had been empty for five minutes. He glanced discreetly at his watch, soon to be late for his first appointment of the day. He was too polite to roll away in the middle of a conversation, though, even a conversation with a stranger. Even a conversation as one-sided as this one had been from jump.
Edgar’s interlocutor was a soft-spoken white man in his late fifties, with hair as fine and light as cornsilk. How they’d started talking, Edgar couldn’t quite remember, but he had been expecting it. He’d looked forward to the Day of Apology with curiosity, and he took the man’s approach in stride, feeling compassionate and well-equipped. Since the accident, Edgar’s interaction with strangers had increased considerably. So, unexpectedly, had his opinion of humanity. People liked to help—if they could identify with you, anyway. No missing limbs, carefully dressed. It was funny; the Vietnam vets he’d met in physical therapy, who’d been through hell and looked it, who could barely get their chairs across the street, said they were generally ignored.
“No kidding,” the man repeated, “my family goes back even before the
Mayflower,
to the Jamestown Colony. You ever heard of Jamestown?”
“Sure,” said Edgar. “Virginia. 1610.” He’d been a history major in college.
“That’s right. That’s when the first slaves came over. In the next few generations, my family got into the cotton business. By the end of the century, we were doing pretty well. Employed over one hundred slaves.”
Employed, thought Edgar.
“I’ve been told,” the man continued, “that we were the first Wilson family in the South, and that any African-Americans named Wilson are most likely our descendants. My family fought in the War of Independence, as a matter of fact. Had an ancestor named Samuel Wilson who was a real patriot, and he marched a whole battalion of his slaves up to Concord and Lexington to fight. He’s mentioned in a bunch of accounts of the battle. I paid a genealogist to do a whole family history a few years back. Fascinating stuff. Samuel got elected to the state government after that, under the old Articles of the Confederacy. His son, or maybe his grandson, I forget which, was a politician, too. Had something to do with the drafting of the Fugitive Slave Act. You know what that is?”