In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a p t e r 6 Toasts Tales of the “Bad Nigger” People who are in the fast life or underground, you know. Or it be somebody that's superstrength, you know . . . doing something as far as pimping or hustling or shooting up some people, being a gangster or something. Or it’s about some other kind of dealing, all dealing in a illegal thing. Usually if he's not a pimp he’s a hustler, if he's not a hustler, it might be a jive bartender, or it just might be a guy that thinks he’s bad, that throw his weight around. . . . Usually at the time I heard them, when I was young, that was like a insight on being big personally. Say, ‘Yeah, I like that. Wow, he was bad!’ . . . Seemed like everybody would like to be whoever that guy was.1 Nathan McCall and the bildungsroman novelists write from the viewpoint of those who have left violent badness behind and entered the nonviolent world. As is only natural, they apply the measurements of the respectable and law-abiding to the street culture of the community which they ¶ed. Even if the bildungsroman protagonist is to the ghetto born, and most of them are, his escape moves him into a different frame of reference whose judgments are set by a different, nonviolent moral code. But those who remain citizens of the street community calibrate their behavior to that community, not the straight one outside. And for them, the American streetmen who develop in the urban landscape of the thirties , forties, ¤fties, and sixties, violence is not a pathology but a way of preserving order in their social structure. As folklorist Anthony Reynolds puts it, “In the Darwinian environment of the ghetto streets, physical prowess is a quality to be admired and emulated.”2 Those who reside in the inner city and help build a violent and criminal brotherhood have their own bards, street poets who create a virtual mythology that embodies the attitudes and values of the street society. Their genre is the “toast,” a narrative poem, usually cast in a sort of pre-rap rhythm, designed for oral delivery by a single performer to an informal or casual audience of other street people, usually young men. The toast chronicles the heroes of the street; de¤nes, celebrates, exaggerates, and often ridicules them; exempli¤es behavior to be avoided or emulated; lays out the rules for pimps and whores; shows the 90 | “BORN IN A MIGHTY BAD LAND” rise and fall of con men; dramatizes the accumulation and loss of wealth; and recounts the transformation of brilliantly clothed macks into threadbare tramps. It is a mirror into which the streetman gazes to see himself, to analyze his lifeways , to ¤nd reasons to laugh at and praise himself, to express his understanding of the world into which he is sealed so hermetically that escape is not even thinkable . Its purpose is the opposite of that of the ghetto bildungsroman. The novel is a lesson in a destructive experience escaped. The toast is a statement of stoical, sometimes joyful, explicit or implicit acceptance of the inescapable given.3 THE TOAST AND ITS MYSTERIES The origin of the term “toast” is unclear. Toast collector Bruce Jackson says that he has “never met anyone who knows why these poems are called toasts” or when they came into being. His own knowledge of the form dates from 1961, when he listened to black convicts perform them at the Indiana State Penitentiary.4 Other scholars trace their origins back to the beginning of the century.5 One of the earliest students of the toast, Roger D. Abrahams, tracks the general toast form to a Scottish tradition of secret drinking societies, a tradition sustained by college fraternities in America. In some cases, says Abrahams, the exchanges between the old blackface minstrel end men and the interlocutor sound a good deal like the later toasts. A simultaneous in¶uence could have been “the custom of the dedicatory speeches or verse toasts pledged with a drink, some of which were quite long and¶amboyant. We know that this custom was taken over by the Negro at least as early as the beginning of this [the twentieth] century.”6 There are many fewer toast collections than ballad collections, so we have considerably less to work with than in the case of the badman ballad. Nearly all of the collections, furthermore, were made by white...

Share