keys and he drove off with all Daddy’s hard work. When Daddy finally got out of bed and saw the car gone, he drove around town, raging, until he spotted the car parked in front of the Science Hill pool hall. He took a tire iron out of his trunk and smashed every part of that car that he’d fixed.
Daddy wasn’t home much and when he was he was in the body shop working and avoiding his family. I stayed in the house where I could watch TV and avoid him and his friends and the cars they worked on. I took Mom’s side because she talked about her side and he didn’t talk much. When she tried to talk to him, he broke a chair over the kitchen table. She asked her brother to talk to him, his brother to talk to him, but he would not listen to anyone. We were his wife and kids and he lived with us, but he also lived with some woman in a trailer behind Oran’s truck stop. When my dad was at home, I remember him most for his anger at me and my sisters for having woken him up watching our Saturday morning cartoons. He’d stomp through the kitchen to stir Folgers Crystals into a cup of microwaved water and sit silently at the table looking tired and introspective and put-out. He’d smoke a few cigarettes and then paint cars until it was time to play music again. Back home at 2:00 AM, still on a performer’s high, he’d brew a pot of coffee and paint some cars and finally go to sleep. He’d lie in bed until late in the afternoon, screaming, “Shut them kids up! I can’t take it.” He’d peel out of our gravel driveway and mom would say, “Well, you ran him off again. I hope you’re happy.”
My mother felt as tied to our house as my dad felt imprisoned by it. She told me I was going to go places in life, but she was scared to let me leave the front yard. She shook her head at the prospect of traveling an hour’s distance to take me to watch the Harlem Globetrotters at Lexington’s Rupp Arena, named after an old racist who never wanted to let black people play basketball. “I don’t know how to get there,” Mom would explain. “And even if I could get to Lexington I wouldn’t know how to drive once I got there.” She was comfortable driving only to places she’d already driven, and only until dusk, when she said her night blindness became too severe to drive anywhere at all. We left my friends’ autumn birthday parties before the cake, Mom wringing her hands and mouthing prayers that we’d make it home before nightfall. Back home, safely, she sat in her recliner underneath an electric blanket, her upper lip shiny with Vicks Vapo Rub, her eyes red and watery, toilet paper wadded in her fists and stuffed between the cushions, and anti-anxiety meds and a can of caffeine-free Pepsi on the floor beside her. “He’s not coming back this time. I just know it.”
My father didn’t want to be an auto-body man with a wife and three kids. He was good enough at guitar to believe it should make him famous. He wanted to be on stage at the Grand Ole Opry. And when my sisters or I pled for a trampoline or cable TV, he’d say, “Well we don’t always get what we want, do we? I wanted to be a famous guitar player.”
It wasn’t enough to be famous in small town Kentucky, to play Saturday nights at his friends’ pig roasts and Sunday afternoons at the flea market. He wanted to be on television, so he hated the guitarists he saw on TV. I listened to him blame the stars for being more good-looking than talented, for having it too easy, for knowing somebody. He didn’t say much, but I latched onto the bit he said: things were unfair.
•
I saw white resentment of black success when I stayed up late to watch Saturday Night Live. Daddy and his friend Kenny watched me watch Eddie Murphy put on makeup to pass as a white man—a satirical reversal of the social experiment from Black Like Me, a book I’d seen on my teacher’s shelf. “Slowly I began to realize,” said the white Eddie Murphy, “that when white people are alone they give things to each other for free.”
Kenny shook his head. “Shoot, ain’t nobody ever give me nothin. Have they you, Mike?”
“They sure ain’t,” said my dad. “They wouldn’t give me air if I was in a jug.”
Kenny’s was a common resentment among the adults I knew: they resented that black people had cornered the market on pity; they resented that black people were free to assume white people had it easy by virtue of being white, even as black people had also—somehow, after centuries of being subjected to the offhand vitriol of whites—cornered the market on taking offense to jokes about race. In 1961, less than twenty-five years before I watched Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live, Dick Gregory—one of the first black comedians to regularly perform for white crowds—joked, “Segregation is not all bad. Have you ever heard of a collision where the people in the back of the bus got hurt?” In 1961, the joke was on segregation. In 1984, the joke was at long last on white people.
I laughed as the white Eddie Murphy sat, stiff and pale, as the last black man exited a bus and the remaining passengers—all white, or so they thought—began to sing and dance, free at last from the burden of his presence. I laughed at Eddie Murphy, in another SNL sketch, playing a grownup Buckwheat from the Little Rascals, mispronouncing the lyrics of popular songs. “Shoot,” said Kenny. “He don’t even know he’s making fun of himself, does he?” Buckwheat kept mispronouncing lyrics. “Well, that’s a nigger for you, ain’t it? Hell, I can’t stand ’em, can you, Mike?”
And Daddy said, “Aw, now I reckon some of ’em’s okay. There’s good ones and bad ones, same as us.” He believed that—or I choose to tell myself he did—but I watched him set aside his convictions to make a joke. I watched him get big laughs in our kitchen on Martin Luther King Jr. Day—the first one our school district had deigned to observe; Kenny asked why I was off school and Daddy shrugged and grinned and said, “Some nigger’s birthday.” Listening to him, I learned that it was okay to make jokes as long as you didn’t mean it. But as irresponsible as he was in leaving me with that lesson, I still find myself wanting to defend my dad, to say he dropped out of school in the eighth grade, didn’t have the advantages of a higher education, grew up in racial isolation in rural Kentucky, or was just joking. White Americans have spent so many decades making these kinds of excuses for our ancestors, and devoted so little time to trying to distinguish the jokes from the threats, or to ask ourselves if there was ever any difference at all.
I heard the word “nigger” as frequently in my dad’s body shop as I did on my N.W.A. cassettes. When presented with a repair estimate, a customer might respond, “Well, I ain’t got the money to fix it right, so I reckon we’ll just have to nigger-rig it.” To barely fix a car was to “nigger-rig” it, but to make a car look too flashy was to “nigger it up,” e.g., “My cousin put ground effects on his pickup, but it just looks too nigger for me.” Black people couldn’t win.
My teachers and church deacons clung to the stereotype of the young black male criminal, but they didn’t like to see young black males getting rich rapping about being criminals. They told me rappers were not as poor as they claimed to be—if they were really from the street they wouldn’t even get past security to sign a record deal. It was all exaggeration, they assured me. The white grownups around me made jokes about black people using food stamps and stealing hubcaps, but they didn’t like to see them use crime or poverty as a means to succeed. “Just look at them waving their guns and their gold chains around,” they might say. “Martin Luther King would be ashamed of them, the way they act.” White people kept buying songs and movies that told those stories—the desperation of drug-dealing, the power of the gun—even as they used those same stories to keep black people right where they were.
White rock bands sued rappers for stealing little slices of sound, after all the moves rock bands had stolen from black guitarists. White rappers stole stories about growing up poor and desperate so that their biographies fit some stereotypical sense of what it meant to be black. White rapper Vanilla Ice outsold any rapper to come before him, his promotional materials presenting a “colorful teen-age background full of gangs, motorcycles and rough-and-tumble street life in lower-class Miami neighborhoods, culminating with his success in a genre dominated by young black males.”3 Black journalist Ken
