Losing My Cool (16 page)

All my life I heard things like this, disconnected bits and pieces, fragments of justification, sometimes vividly painful vignettes, sometimes hauntingly vague allusions to Pappy's younger days and what he had endured in the South and beyond. As a child who was encouraged and even bribed to flourish and realize myself, I took Pappy's pain almost for granted: Things were harder in the olden days, right? I couldn't wrap my mind around the injustice; it was alien to me. Surely things couldn't be that bad, I thought, pushing the imagery out of my mind, out of my way. But that summer at my parents' house, a guest now and no longer a tenant, I began to revisit those stories I had heard as a child and to see them anew, with fresh eyes, with a new curiosity, and with a new sense of horror.

 

 

 

 

One goes as follows: In 1959 Pappy was twenty-two, completely alone, just out of college, and doing graduate work in sociology at Cal State, Los Angeles. He was also looking for a job to pay the bills. One day he showed up at a government building downtown to take an aptitude test for some civil-service position he had seen advertised in the newspaper. The commute was easy, the work was interesting, and the pay was good. Inside the building, in a large room where the test was being given, there were numerous applicants, thirty or more, and one administrator, a young Chinese or Korean woman who was seated alone up front. The way it worked, applicants walked from the back, where they entered, up to the front, where the administrator waited, and were given copies of the test and some instructions and told to take a seat. When Pappy's turn came and he reached out for his test, the Asian woman picked up a copy from the pile, same as she had for everyone else, but instead of handing it over to Pappy, she held it out in front of her and then tore the paper in half, slowly, purposefully, in a noisy and exaggerated motion that made the other test takers look up from their work.

“What's going on?” Pappy asked, though I suspect he knew full well what was happening.

“We don't have any tests for niggers,” she announced matter-of-factly, staring him in the face.

It was a jolting, graphic kind of bigotry, which, when I picture it, seems almost cinematic in that sunny Tinseltown setting, like something possible only in a movie—only in a fucked-up
noir
. Accustomed to blunt racism but unable to grasp what he had personally ever done to invite such naked hatred, Pappy was devastated but resolved not to allow his antagonist the victory of seeing him broken and diminished.

“I see, well, thank you for your time, then,” was all he said, and he picked up his briefcase with a forced poise no twenty-two-year-old I know will ever need to muster. The walk from the front of the room to the back and out the door, he says, was one of the longest and most self-conscious of his life. A half-century later he can scarcely discuss the episode without vibrating in rage.

Not long after that, Pappy found a job at an insurance company for which he was grossly overqualified. The commute was long, about twice the distance that it would have been to the government gig, and it involved a combination of walking and riding the bus. The pay was also less. But the insurance company was willing to hire blacks, and Pappy took the position without having to think about it very hard.

In the evenings, after work and late into the night, he studied for school and also for himself. He studied until his eyes went out and sometimes he fell asleep with his shoes on. There were stretches—weeks, sometimes even months—when money was so scant, he ate peanut butter by the spoonful for breakfast and lunch. Good source of protein, he said. And also, by forgoing meals, he could still buy books:
The Wretched of the Earth
, by Frantz Fanon;
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
, by Harold Cruse;
The Collected Short Stories of Eudora Welty
;
The Theory of the Leisure Class
, by Thorstein Veblen;
Candide
, by Voltaire;
The Division of Labor in Society
, by Emile Durkheim;
The House of Mirth
, by Edith Wharton;
The Sun Also Rises
, by Ernest Hemingway;
Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe
;
The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
, by Franz Kafka;
The Complete Works of Guy de Maupassant
. Pappy never believed in God; reading was his lone salvation. Nor did he simply amass books or peruse them; he
strove
with them in the full religious sense of the word that Kierkegaard intended—he fought these texts as if his life were at stake—which, in a way, it was.

 

 

 

 

When I was growing up, if you were to walk into my father's library and pick up one of his books at random, you would see on the inside cover, written in a careful hand, Pappy's signature hovering above the precise date and location of purchase (“Clarence Leon Williams, January 6, 1973, Days in Spokane” or “CLW, November 18, 1965, Santa Monica”). Which is to say, you would catch a glimpse of the reverence with which this Southerner from the wrong side of the color line regarded the object in your hand. If you were to thumb through the book, you would notice other things, too: margins overrun with ink, questions demanded, allusions uncovered, arcana circled and defined, arguments digested and broken down, rebuttals and counterarguments sustained and advanced—you would see a probing mind, the mind of what society had designated a nigger, waging intellectual warfare.You would see acts of civil disobedience (whether they were violent or not would only depend on your perspective).

If you were to walk several paces beyond Pappy's study, back into my bedroom, however, and sift through the stacks of
Vibe
magazines, the towers of CDs and mountains of Nike Airs, and come upon some of
my
books, you would see something else entirely. You would see pristine texts that had not been hard-won but that had been given to me (Plutarch's
Lives
, say). Inside the cover there would be the same familiar handwriting (“To—Thomas Chatterton Williams; From, Pappy, with best wishes—always! Dec. 6, 1995, Days at Fanwood, New Jersey *Note: These are lives worth studying carefully.”) If you were to flip through the pages, though, you would see only evidence of absence, a lack of marginalia and wear and tear, a kind of apophatic argument, a mind unaware of what so recently was at stake, a perfunctory mind, the mind of a comfortable and pampered teenager who just happened to be black—the way he happened to be skinny and happened to have long fingers—and against whom society hardly could be said to hold an insurmountable grudge; you would see a mind that had been going through the motions.You would see a mind that didn't think books were very
cool
.

It was only after living in Georgetown and coming back to Fanwood that I could understand what it was all about. I could finally step back and see Pappy's library for all the books in it and begin to recognize what exactly he had been trying to share with me. I had to go away to appreciate this. It had been too overwhelming for me as a child. Pappy's books held our house under a perpetual siege; the house itself was his library. The study was the heart, with shelves and tables buckling (literally) beneath the weight of his books: to the left from the front door, leaning floor-to-ceiling shelves of Negro literature, African-American polemics, slave narratives, and black sociology; to the right, a wide, low shelf like an open credenza of Chinese and Japanese history, Russian literature, and some Southern literature (Faulkner, O'Connor, Harper Lee, Capote—if you consider him Southern); in recessed shelving above that, rows of short stories and plays (Mary McCarthy, Salinger, Tennessee Williams, Sophocles); against the far wall, behind the desk, two large tables holding on for dear life under the weight of centuries of classical and western European philosophical thought; on the desk, a constantly updated selection of flavors-of-the month (
The House of Rothschild
, a Hannah Arendt reader,
The 48 Laws of Power
) and perennial favorites (
The Story of Philosophy
, various Foucault readers,
Das Kapital
); behind the tables of philosophy, partially inaccessible floor-to-ceiling shelves of American and British literature, essays, sociology, criticism, political science, and economic theory; on a folding table between the desk and picture window, biographies of military tacticians (Hannibal, Bismarck, Talleyrand) and literary nonfiction (Didion, Lasch, Borges, some Baldwin); on the half-wall separating the study from the kitchen, dictionaries, atlases, western European history, and art history (Western and Eastern). That was the study, but there were also shelves and piles in the kitchen and dining room (mostly math and science), in his and my mother's bedroom (random bedside novels, some sociology); in the hallway underneath our family portraits on a caving plywood shelf (the complete
Encyclopædia Britannica
); in the basement (a whole library unto itself), in boxes in the garage (textbooks), on shelves in the laundry room (not sure), and in boxes in the attic (ditto). Sometimes, when Pappy was moving things around, there were books in the bathroom. The collection came to something between 10,000 and 15,000 volumes in total. All this, packed tight into a boxy single-story home—it put the laws of not only interior design but also physics to the test.

 

 

 

 

Coming up, I hadn't had the courage or the imagination to go against my neighborhood's grain, to be that kid who says: Screw it; I'm different.Where I lived, books were like kryptonite to niggas—they were terrified, allergic, broke out into rashes and hives. Charles Dickens was something that swung between your legs, not the author of
Martin Chuzzlewit
. You could get your ass kicked for name-dropping and using big words. Brothers weren't out to be poets or theoreticians; most of the time, they weren't even trying to be articulate—they talked with their hands (fists, daps, slaps, pounds, peace signs, jump shots, tabletop percussion) and yearned to be athletes and rappers, not scholars or gentlemen.

Like most teenagers, I was just trying to get by in the Darwinian landscape I found myself thrust into, maybe to get a little action on Friday night if I was lucky, and above all not to be considered a freak or a mark. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. To survive, I drank in my community's mores, including its fear of learning, even as I capitulated to my father's seemingly eccentric will at home. After a hell of a lot of effort in both directions, by the time I was eighteen, I damn near had mastered the delicate balance of keeping it real and keeping Pappy satisfied at the same time.

And then, suddenly, everything got thrown in reverse when I started hanging with armchair philosophers and intellectual show-offs like Playboy. Different game, different rules—now it was more like: Come with a weak vocabulary, mispronounce Ingres or Descartes, stress the wrong syllable in
bathos
or
banal
, own up to never having heard of
Gravity's Rainbow
(You don't read Pynchon?), and you could get laughed at to your face. Up was down.

As always, the wrong diction got you pounced on and no one would come to your defense. But the definition of “wrong” had changed. Now it was the know-it-all, free as a schoolyard bully or bird of prey, who was tearing you to shreds, and there were enough wannabe Harold Blooms lurking around to shame any sympathetic philistines into submission. You could end up in incredibly humiliating positions if you got caught off guard. At first I couldn't believe what was happening—truly couldn't believe that at Georgetown everyone wanted to be the smartest person in the room—it was like I had driven through a black hole somewhere along Interstate 95 and entered into a parallel universe.

The embarrassing truth, then, is that I was ushered back toward books not by any noble epiphany or thirsty mind but by little more than peer pressure—ironically the same force that in high school drove me from them. But certain switches only flip in one direction, and soon I was reading for myself and myself alone. Back at home, free from Stacey, free from my neighborhood, free from the hip-hop demimonde at Georgetown, free from snobbish pretense, I began to hit Pappy's library in earnest. “You don't need anybody if you have books,” Pappy used to say, and I was beginning to believe him. “Other than you, your mother, and your brother, these are my only friends, right here—and if you talk to them, son, you can talk to geniuses.”

In the beginning, I set out to read whatever was most unlike me. I knew enough to do that. It was around this time that I met some of Pappy's old friends: Vladimir Nabokov and Humbert Humbert, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jay Gatsby, Robert Graves and Emperor Claudius, Oscar Wilde and Dorian Gray. The vast walls of books in our cluttered little house became Borges's magical aleph and I found that if I looked the right way I could see the whole world.

 

 

 

 

Besides my family, the only people I saw regularly that summer were my old friend Sam and two young twin brothers named Shadik and Shadir, whom I had met through Sam and to whom I had become something like an older sibling. One evening, the four of us were at Sam's mother's house, up in his attic bedroom, listening to No Limit Records CDs and talking, his ten-year-old
Word Up!
magazine posters staring down at us from the sloped green ceiling. I was lying on the floor, flipping through a stack of Sam's old photographs. One of them in particular caught my eye. The picture is of Stacey and me.We are sitting at a metal and glass patio table in her grandmother's backyard. To judge from our clothing, it's one of those hybrid or crossover spring or fall days, part summer, part winter, where you can dress for whichever season you please and still be perfectly comfortable. Stacey is wearing Daisy Dukes shorts and a white wife-beater. Her hair is gathered back into a ponytail or bun. She has no makeup on and doesn't need any. I am sitting with my arm around her, dressed in baby blue velour sweatpants, a white T-shirt, and an open baby blue velour zip-up jacket. I have Tar Heel blue-and-white Nike Dunks on my feet and my hair is shaved low, almost bald. Both of us are staring straight into the camera like we were caught by surprise and only looked up at the very last moment.