Read Online Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach - Free Book Online Page A

have dough and still be down. Against his will, Dre sympathized; he was touched with a similar angst. Being black and middle class sometimes felt like a contradiction in terms, and only one of the two could be disguised. He’d had his comfort thrown in his face,
punk Oreo cookie motherfucker,
enough to know how to pretend, guiltily, that he was lower-bracketed.
    Nique quick-plucked the cigarette from his mouth. “So you just don’t like white people,” he said, hand blooming into gesture, elbow resting on his knee. Nique was made of angles, from the planar jut of his neck to the wide, cagey V of his smile. Macon’s stomach did a little fear-excitement flip-kick.
Now we’re getting
somewhere.
    “I don’t like whiteness. And as a white person looking for some heroes, it’s lonely out here. The museum’s empty. Look at me, for instance. Sure, I might have missed a couple ferries back to Honky-town, but so what? They run every hour. I can sunbathe on the island of Blackness all summer. But when the seasons change, will I hunker down and spend the winter in my vacation spot?”
    “Dunno, nigga, will you?”
    Macon smiled, pleased with the mockery. “Everybody thinks they will,” he said, chest swelling with furtive superhero pride. “But there’s no way to tell who’s down, really, until we hit the crucial moment.” His hand twitched, remembering the feel of the gun, and Macon’s brain secreted an obedient montage of authenticating moments: late-night graffiti missions with Aura, the two of them smearing fame across the belly of the ghetto, and dinners presided over by regal black matriarchs, the mothers of his closest friends— Macon so black he used more hot sauce on his food than anybody, so much that little sisters with antenna-looking braids peered over the table at his plate wide-eyed.
    Macon kept such snapshots on instant recall; they occupied a larger percentage of his memory than of his life. Their opposites, the times Macon had felt awkward and abandoned by blacks and whites alike, the awful moments he’d let
nigger
glide unchecked from his white friends’ mouths instead of punching them in the face— moments when vigilance had been too much of a hassle to disrupt the party for—were stored where Macon didn’t have to see them.
    Nique slow-rolled the tip of his cigarette against the lip of a glass ashtray liberated from a restaurant. “Ah, yes.” He smirked. “The crucial moment. When rivers of blood gush through the streets and Uncle Tom’s ghost pulls white folks’ hearts out of their chests to balance them against a feather.”
    Macon exhaled short and shallow through his nose, approximating a laugh. “No racial apocalypse needed. Individuals face individual moments of reckoning. And most bitch out.”
    “How ’bout John Brown, Harpers Ferry?” suggested Andre.
    Nique rolled his eyes. “Leave it to Dre to pull a heroic white man out his ass.”
    Macon sat forward and cracked his knuckles. “You know why John Brown tried to free those slaves? His old lady left him for a slave owner. The whole thing was a crazy, ill-conceived act of revenge. Fuck John Brown.”
    Nique rocked in his chair and clapped his hands. “Oh, man,” he said, clutching Macon’s shoulder as if he was about to present him with a trophy. “ ‘Fuck John Brown.’ I love it. So you’re it, huh, dog? The downest whiteboy in history.”
    “I didn’t say that,” Macon protested, declining to counter with a name.
    Andre’s eyes were narrow. “I never heard that shit about John Brown.”
    “They don’t teach it in school.”
    “True.” Nique nodded with quasi-comic vigor. “True indeed. Feeding the black man nothing but his-story, tricknowledgy, and sinformation. Locking him away in the library, where the white man buries the lies.” He elbowed Andre in the ribs and Andre knocked his arm away, not in the mood.
    “And charging him an arm and a leg for it,” Macon added, trying to lane-merge with Nique’s