To be black, male and conscious: race, rage, and manhood in America

Robert Sayre suggests in his study of the American autobiography that autobiographers fall into a variety of categories: those engaging a literary consciousness, those promoting a certain kind of secularization, those writing from the core of their experiences, and those writing along ideological or political lines. ¹ In Makes Me Wanna Holler, African American journalist Nathan McCall draws heavily from the last two of these important American autobiographical traditions, yet is able to extend the boundaries of the autobiographical tradition to provide insights into the way masculinity sits at the heart of many American narratives. Even as McCall places political and experiential ideologies at the center of his journey toward the self, his self-conception rests on a masculine imperative.

McCall, whose book jacket bears the imprimaturs of patrons no less notable than African American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and author Claude Brown, recounts a transformation from violence, robbery, rape, near murder, and incarceration (from 1975 to 1978) to subsequent recovery. As a white feminist scholar, I recognize the inherent value of examining the intersections of race and gender in ways that address the complex concerns of black male writers. McCall’s book represents an important contribution to the canon of American studies, especially as an autobiographical work that gives voice to the painful workings of race, class, and gender in the American landscape. McCall concentrates on race and gender in this work, although his ruminations on the way in which race and class work together to produce poverty are certainly present. In the unfolding of his past, McCall evokes the tremors of many American transformative accounts, and his work stands as a reminder that transformation undergirds the American experience. Makes Me Wanna Holler is a journey not just from degradation to accomplishment, but also from absence to self-determined presence. Although McCall travels through the spiritual realms of Christianity and Islam, his tale depicts a fuller radicalization of the self, not a spiritual conversion.

Makes Me Wanna Holler is also a stark reminder, as Nina Baym has argued, that the matrix of American thought and literature, of American exigency and recovery, is bound in assumptions of masculinity under siege. ² With this autobiography, McCall has limned a work that stands as immediate testimony to the melodramas that beset black manhood. Do not expect the elaborate literary form of Melville, Hawthorne, or Cooper; however, McCall’s naked honesty and smooth homeboy argot claim an audience that might otherwise be excluded, especially black men whose rage is always a focal point of the work. The text of this autobiography is in ways reminiscent of the Malcolm X Autobiography and alludes to that work through its spirit of change. McCall’s incarceration, for example, bears many of the high-water marks of Malcolm’s: reading, improving vocabulary, and learning history and philosophy. Yet, Malcolm’s spiritual presence in no way infuses this autobiography; McCall’s chapters “Islam” and “Black Mecca” seem at first to be homages to Malcolm, but they still reflect the ironies of McCall’s own experience. ³

In 1963, James Baldwin made his contribution to the continuing effort to chart race in America when he said, “To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.” ⁴ It is not merely the synergism of blackness and consciousness in America that yields rage; it is also the triangulation of these forces with masculinity in the American tableau that spawns the most formidable, unyielding rage of all. Baldwin also wrote soberly of the black man “forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it.” ⁵ This rendering of a masculine self under siege fuels McCall’s autobiographical voice and lends powerful support to a rendering of his experiences and politics. Yet, ironically, in his potent blend of African American and masculine sensibilities, McCall both proffers his most valuable racial...