from Talking to Myself

Nigger . . . Nigger . . . Nigger . . .

I wheeled around, my fists cocked, ready to slug it out with Destiny and Infamy, when I saw a young white man bopping and reeling toward me, completely in his world, swinging a boombox one-handed, in sync with a metallic echo of the future. Something drained out of me, and something else entered my heart. That was in the early '90s on Kirkwood Avenue in Bloomington, Indiana.

I stood there clenching and unclenching my fists, but I wasn't angry at the man walking to the mechanical rhythm of his boombox. I was saddened by the voice behind the buffoonery pulsing through that Spring afternoon. I refused to call it music; I felt assaulted by the noise, and I assured myself that this dark cloud would soon fall apart.

For years, I retreated into wishful thinking and the restorative genius and power of modern jazz, and I risked dreaming myself beyond the artificial boom-throb of rap and hip-hop. No, I didn't see the continuous bobbing up and down of heads caught in the sway of commercialized pathos produced by the blame factories of America. So many souls were plugged into their excuse machines and unplugged from their hearts, weighed down with fake gold and the trickery of bling, but I was determined not to see what I was seeing, not to hear what I was hearing on the streets, and not to feel what I was feeling inside my skin.

However, snippets of boom-throb still wormed their way under the seams of my life and created agony. Whenever I got upset, my alter ego, Brother Pointblank, appeared with his barrage of questions and answers. And, he's a tough interlocutor.

"That's them and you're you," said Brother Pointblank.

"But I can't ignore that noise anymore. That damn boom-throb is undermining us all," I said.

"Why must it always come down to skin color? If the magic word had come out of that white boy's mouth, you would have slugged him and you'd now feel better, right?"

"No. Well. Maybe."

"That rap embarrasses you, doesn't it? It doesn't measure up to the image of your Frederick Douglass, your MLK, your W.E.B., your Malcolm X, your Barbara Jordan, your Angela Davis, your James Baldwin, and it embarrasses you."

"It embarrasses me because it doesn't embarrass them, " I said. "They seem not to have any shame."

"A mask doesn't have any shame, unless someone paints, or etches shame onto it. And, even if the music is a soundtrack to a coon show, rappers should have the right to express themselves. You aren't the culture police. Anyway, this fad is going to burn itself out in no time."

"I just want our people to possess the power of reflection," I said.

"When did your people ever know quietness or solitude?"

"It was in our music. We could fit our hearts between the syncopated spaces. Just listen to Thelonious."

"Well, maybe your people had solitude in those cotton fields."

"The field hollers are in our cities. But also in a maze where the masks devour each other."

When I unlocked the door and entered my sanctuary, I walked straight over to the CD player and clicked it on. Miles Davis' "The Birth of the Cool" filled the room. I poured a glass of Merlot from Australia, pulled down a copy of Dudley Randall's The Black Poets, leaned back in my easy chair, and began to reread Etheridge Knight's "The Violent Space": "Exchange in greed ungraceful signs. . . ."

For years, I sought refuge from rap and hip-hop by embracing jazz and the world of literature. I had eyes. I had ears. I knew what was good and what was bad. I traveled the world: Australia, Japan, Italy, France, New Guinea, et cetera.

Of course, Brother Pointblank was with me. In those moments of solitude, I still had the capacity to see the visual buffoonery of Dennis Rodman posed on the cover of Bad As I Wanna Be. I tried to push aside the...