Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities

1. A Foot Deep in the Culture: The Thug Knowledge(s) of A Man Called Hawk

13 1 A Foot Deep in the Culture The Thug Knowledge(s) of A Man Called Hawk In the fall of 1985 the television series Spenser for Hire debuted on the ABC network. The main character of the hour-long drama, an urbane Boston-based private detective named Spenser, was based on a character featured in a series of novels authored by Robert Parker. Spenser was portrayed by the actor Robert Urich as an upscale version of Dan Tanna, a character Urich played in the late 1970s series Vegas. At the height of the popularity of Parker’s Spenser novels in the late 1980s, much was made of how much Parker’s identity informed that of Spenser. As one writer described it, both Spenser and Parker wear “polished loafers with tassels, blue denims with an open-neck shirt and expensive sport jacket.” Parker and his character Spenser embodied “business casual” well before such a term existed, and in the mid-1980s such a style gave Spenser an air of sophistication rarely associated with those in his profession. That Parker and Spenser were so closely linked rendered the character of Spenser believable. In both the novels and the television series, Spenser often collaborated with a black “enforcer” simply known as Hawk. As described by Parker, “Hawk has the same skills and inclinations , but he grew up in another way with a different set of pressures .”1 Whatever sensibilities that Hawk might have shared with Spenser and however progressive Parker imagined the character to be, the reality was that Hawk was all too familiar to audiences who had grown comfortable with seeing a big black bald man, clad in black leather, with a big black gun—a performance that has historically been known as that of the “bad (black) man.” In his book Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life, the historian William L. Van Deburg discusses the “bad 14 A Foot Deep in the Culture (black) man” in the context of what he calls “black social bandits .” According to Van Deburg, these figures, as constructed by post–Civil War writers, were often “Quirky, quixotic, and prone to appropriating white-owned status symbols as partial compensation for past indignities,” and were “wedded to the cause of group freedom and saw nothing wrong with extralegal means to balance the scales of justice.” “Typically more extroverted and colorful than the average individual,” Van Deburg notes, these “outlaws of American folk history won wide acceptance as risk-taking representatives of an unjustly demeaned race.”2 As a dual product of Robert Parker’s imagination and the American psyche, Hawk seemingly did little to disturb long-held popular beliefs about adult black masculinity. According to Avery Brooks, the actor who brought Hawk to life on the small screen, “I’ve been asked many times whether I was exactly like the Hawk character.”3 Brooks, who has portrayed figures as diverse as Othello, Malcolm X, and Paul Robeson, is a classically trained actor who, in 1976, earned the first MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in theater granted to an African American at Rutgers University. At the time that Brooks accepted the role of Hawk, he was a tenured professor of theater at the university. None of Brooks’s accomplishments were apparent to those fans (many of them white) who approached Brooks and, as he describes it, “think that I actually carry a gun, and that probably I was standing on a street corner somewhere and these producers saw me and asked me if I wanted to come on television.”4 In many ways Avery Brooks is as illegible—unbelievable—to mainstream audiences as Hawk is believable to those same audiences. When I watched Spenser for Hire in the mid-1980s, Hawk was absolutely believable and riveting for me as a twenty-year-old who imagined living a life of the mind while trying to negotiate the demands of the social spaces I called home. Hawk seemed to exist somewhere in between Amiri Baraka’s Blues People and the vestibules where my boyhood friends were selling crackcocaine and weed. At the time Hawk embodied what some dismissively call “street smarts,” though Hawk immediately struck me as a character who was highly literate. In his book Your Aver- A Foot Deep in the Culture 15 age Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity, Vershawn Ashanti Young writes, “literacy is not chiefly about matching pronouns with the...