What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker Read online

  I wrote this book because in telling my story I’m also telling a piece of the stories of Vivienne Young (my mom) and Wilbur Young (my dad). I want people to know them. Because to know them—even just the sliver of them that I was able to capture here—is to know how blackness doesn’t just find space but conjures beauty in a country specifically constructed to crush them. And to know them is to know that they knew what was happening, and what would happen, but didn’t allow that premonition to prevent them from fighting it, and also clawing and etching out a capacity to love.

  I wrote this book because, well, I’ve never read about two niggas in suits about to fight at 3 A.M. over some buffet bacon while surrounded by black women with miniskirts and PhDs. Or about the distinct lexicon black porn stars use when speaking to each other on camera, something I discovered during the black porno bartering service I ran for two weeks out of my locker in eleventh grade. Or about the transparent and desperate and daffy measures some niggas took in the late nineties to model themselves after Darius Lovehall from Love Jones, because they (well, we) believed that writing bomb-ass poetry like he did would make girls want to give us some bomb-ass booty. Or about how true Kool-Aid connoisseurs can tell you which flavors go best with meat or fish. Or about what exactly makes someone an “Instant Oatmeal Crip.” Combined, these tidbits and others assemble to remind me and inform whoever happens to read this that you can’t tell my story the way I’d want my story told without comedy. It’s been a security blanket providing catharsis when necessary—and company when the catharsis becomes too exhausting and corrosive. I’ve discovered how valuable humor and the laughter that sometimes drips and sometimes billows from it can be when resisting white supremacy. What I once thought of as elective is now understood as a necessity.

  I also wrote this book because I was terrified to write it. I am terrified of refreshing long-dormant memories and challenging long-settled beliefs, which is exactly what this book did. I am terrified of the person this book says I am meeting the person I believed myself to be. I am terrified of what might happen when people I know and love read this. I am terrified of what might happen when people I barely fucking like might read this. I am terrified that people I hardly know and people I’ll never know will read this and know things about me that I’ve never admitted to those closest to me. I’m terrified that this book sucks. That I’m maybe too glib. Or too awkward. Or too solipsistic. Or too insensitive. Or that maybe my story is either too esoteric or not esoteric enough. I’m terrified of the possibility of this book changing my life and terrified of the possibility that it won’t change anything. I am nearing forty now, which unfortunately means that I don’t have the same speed and stamina to run from these terrors as I did in my athletic prime. (Don’t get it twisted—I’m still spry as fuck. A nigga just needs to stretch sometimes.) And so now I’m just going to turn and face them as best I can, and writing this book is me giving those terrors the finger.

  I wrote this book because I believe, right now, that its existence means that instead of the events of my life occurring as random and haphazard incidents with no purpose, they’re distinct pieces of a puzzle. Perhaps this is wishful thinking, a way to reverse-engineer deeper meanings to a mundane life. Kind of like how sports writers assign mystical and metaphysical properties to a thing achieved during a game—a clutch buzzer beater, perhaps—but if you ask the player about the act, he’ll just say, “I was open, so I shot it, and it went in.” I don’t know. I just know that I haven’t always believed that my life made any sort of sense. What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker is, mostly, a series of attempts to find some solidity and lucidity in the relentless absurdity of existing while black in America. And right now, today, this book makes me believe my efforts matter.

  1

  Nigger Fight Story

  At seventeen, I wanted nothing more than for someone to call me a nigger.

  Not a nigga. I was already that each time I talked to Brian Carroll, my best friend since we played against each other at Expos Basketball Camp at the Shadyside Boys & Girls Club when we were twelve and discovered that we lived a block away from each other. I lived on the 700 block of Mellon Street in East Lib, and he lived on the part of Negley Avenue where Black Street begins and starts to stretch up into Garfield. We shared an affinity for Wendy’s junior bacon cheeseburgers and staying up until midnight to watch Pac-10 and West Coast Conference college basketball games on ESPN, and we’d argue in his parents’ basement about who’d make a better pro—Oregon State’s Gary Payton (Brian’s choice) or Loyola Marymount’s Bo Kimble. “Nigga, stop playin’. You know that gunning-ass beige nigga can’t fuck with GP.” And it still kills me that Brian was right because Bo Kimble never learned how to go left. The way we met reminds me of “You Got Me,” that song from the Roots where Black Thought raps, “We use to live in the same building / on the same floor / And never met before / Until I’m overseas on tour.” (Little hood niggas get meet-cutes too, apparently. How do you like dem apples, Nora Ephron?)

  I don’t remember when I first knew that a nigger was the worst thing you can call a black person. I suspect I was born with it embedded in my DNA, like how humans evolved to fear fire and black people evolved to fear potato salad made by white people. But I knew my parents used nigga. They wouldn’t use it around me, but I’d hear them tossing it back and forth downstairs at night sometimes when I was in bed and they assumed I was asleep.

  “Spike Lee gotta be the most bowlegged nigga in Brooklyn,” Dad joked with Mom the night after they first watched Do the Right Thing. “Yeah,” Mom agreed, “it’s like that nigga’s knees are horizontal.” I’d love to hear those secret and comfortable niggas escaping their lips because it meant they were getting along that day. And I’d just know that nigga was different from nigger because they’d say it with so much ease. There was no malice behind it. Just rhythm.

  Nigga flew free and easy when I’d hang with my cousins and uncles in New Castle, the depressed steel town sixty miles northwest of Pittsburgh. It’s where Dad was from, and my parents and I would drive an hour up I-79 several times a year for reunions, weddings, picnics, funerals, New Castle High School or Union Area High School basketball games, and sometimes just to bring back two boxes of Coney Island or Post Office Lunch chili dogs—both of which helped the city earn the distinction of the Hot Dog Capital of the World. I am forever grateful that I was indoctrinated with New Castle hot dog chili when I was a toddler and too naive to be skeptical. Because while it tastes amazing, it looks like refried regret and there’s no fucking way I’d put that shit within a mile of my lips if I were first introduced to it now. On the midnight rides back home to Pittsburgh, I’d sleep underneath a blanket in the backseat of my parents’ Thunderbird while they smoked Kools and listened to Steely Dan’s Gaucho or one of the Charlie Parker mixes Dad would make on the living room stereo. Christmastime was my favorite time to make those trips, because then we’d listen to “Soulful Christmas”—the dad-curated compilation of Christmas standards performed by artists like Take 6, the Boys Choir of Harlem, and Louis Armstrong. And while I abhor cigarettes now—I’ve never smoked, and my annoyance with them congealed into abject hate after lung cancer killed Mom in 2013—the warmth and the haze from the smoke inching back from the front seats always made me feel protected. Like my parents had been compressed into a fog and were wrapping around me.

  And at Peabody and Pennley and Mellon and Reizenstein—the East Liberty basketball courts where I’d practice and play, for hours at a time, every day the weather permitted—I could chart my progression as a ball player by the type of nigga I was to the oldheads. At nine I started off as “that eggheaded little nigga.” By eleven, they dropped the egghead, and I’d just be “that little nigga.” By the time I was thirteen and able to smack boards, I was “that nigga Damon.” (They knew my name!) Soon after, I was “that nigga D.” And then, when I was approaching sixteen and I’d finally surpassed most of them and they wanted to be on my team, I graduated to “my nigga.”

  But as essential and lubricative and anointing as nigga was, it didn’t fulfill me. I wanted someone white to call me a nigger, and I needed that nigger to have ill intent and be meant to beat the black out of my feelings. And I craved that experience because being called a nigger by a white person was a necessary requirement for what I really wished to possess: the nigger fight story.

  My parents had one. A great one. You will never find a nigger fight story better than the one they possessed. It was 1985. I was six. Mom and Nana (my mom’s mom) were post-Sunday-brunch browsing and shopping in Squirrel Hill, a thriving, dense, and traditionally Jewish neighborhood on the East End. They stopped at Isaly’s, a then-popular Pittsburgh-area cafe chain, to buy some ice cream.

  Nana, after her quart of French vanilla was rung up by the white boy behind the register: “Four fifty? I thought this was on sale.”

  “No. It’s four fifty.”

  Mom chimed in: “But the sign on the window said it’s on sale.”

  “The ice cream is four fifty.”

  “You should do something about that sign.”

  “And you black nigger bitches need to go somewhere else.”

  “What the fuck did you say?”

  “You heard me.”

  Furious, my mom snatched the ice cream out of Nana’s hands, threw it on the marble floor, and warned, “We’ll be back.” My mom was the Terminator. They left, went up the street to the Giant Eagle on Murray Avenue to find Dad, and returned to Isaly’s.

  Dad walks up to the white boy—who, according to the story, looked to be eighteen or nineteen—and calmly asks him to apologize to Mom and Nana. He refuses. Dad repeats himself. “I’m going to say this again. And if you don’t apologize, I’m going to jump back there and k
ick your fucking ass with this baseball bat.” Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Dad had a baseball bat with him. It had been sitting in the trunk of our car. My dad is black beatnik John Wick. The kid, who is clearly showing signs that he just might be the dumbest motherfucker on earth, still doesn’t apologize.

  This makes Dad, a man who takes his fight cues from Shane and the rest of the thousands of westerns he watched as a kid, threaten, “I’m going to count to ten. And when I reach ten, I’m coming back there.” Then he actually counted to ten.

  (In hindsight, the kid behind the counter really had no way of knowing that if a black parent starts counting, once that black parent stops counting, you need to brace yourself because furniture will start moving.)

  At ten, he tried to pull the kid over the counter by his collar and hit him with the bat. The kid slipped out of his grasp, and somehow managed to grab a butcher knife that was randomly lying around and swing it at Dad. Because why wouldn’t a butcher knife be readily available in an ice cream shop? Because this Squirrel Hill Isaly’s was also apparently the House of Blue Leaves from Kill Bill.

  During all of this, my bank-teller mom and my award-winning-organist nana are smashing random bottles and display cases in the store, leaving destruction and M&M’s everywhere. Mom is also encouraging Dad: “Whoop his ass! Whoop that white boy’s ass!” I come from amazing black women.

  My John Shaft–with-an-NPR-membership dad smartly realizes that a butcher knife beats a baseball bat in literally every conceivable way and backs off. But not before Mom grabs a jar of olives—again, this apparently was the randomest deli of all time; I wouldn’t have been surprised if it were a jar of live frogs—and chucks it through the window and into the street, sending shards of racist glass and chunks of bigoted salad olives onto the sidewalk.

  By this point, the police had shown up and Nana and my parents were promptly questioned, detained without incident, and taken to the station. While there waiting for whatever black people who start race riots at neighborhood delis wait for at police stations, they were approached by a black woman with some sort of authority. A sergeant or a lieutenant, perhaps.

  “You decent-looking, brunch-attending, and Bonneville-driving black people aren’t supposed to be here. What happened?”

  They explained, and she left. Moments later she came back.

  “You’re free to go.”

  “What happened?”

  “You were racially intimidated.”

  “So, no charges?”

  “No.”

  “What about the store damage?”

  “If y’all negroes don’t get up and sprint out of here before these white folks figure out I’m letting you go . . .”

  Even my sister, Jamie, who’s nine years older than me, had a cool story about the time she beat this girl up in high school choir practice for calling her a nigger. The aftermath is even better. She got suspended from school and was terrified she’d get in trouble when my parents heard what happened. But once Mom and Dad found out why she got suspended, she didn’t get grounded. She got butter pecan ice cream. I wanted my own post-nigger-fight-story ice cream party, with cake and candles and cards and Polaroids documenting everything, just so I wouldn’t be the only nigger-fight-story-less nigga in our house.

  Being called a nigger would seem to be an easy task for a kid growing up in Pittsburgh, a city so historically, hilariously, and hopelessly white that Rick James once tried to snort it. But although surrounded by whiteness, I existed in a nigger-free zone. A nigger vacuum. A nigger-deficient silo. A nigger event horizon.

  From the time my parents moved there when I was nine until the summer before my seventeenth birthday, I lived in East Liberty. Which used to be predominantly black before gentrifiers and colonizers transformed and rebranded it into the “Portlandia but with Pierogies” it is today. So it’s not like I was going to hear it there. The only white people on my block were either cops or cameramen actually filming the TV show Cops. (Seriously. Cops was in my neighborhood so often that I once spent an entire summer following cop cars on my bike, hoping to catch some screen time if they happened to be filming. It didn’t work.)

  And while I attended predominantly white schools, I wasn’t going to hear it there either. At St. Bartholomew, where I went from sixth to eighth grade, most of the white boys—and all of the cool and popular and tough ones—were my football and basketball teammates. And I was good at both. And if you’re good at sports in middle school, all your teammates are your friends by default. And all the girls either like you (which is good) or don’t actively dislike you (which, when dealing with thirteen-year-old girls, is fucking great). That’s just how it works. And basketball friends don’t call basketball friends niggers. Especially if the black kid is the point guard and you want to continue receiving perfect pocket passes off of high ball screens and staggered double-flex cuts. Call me a nigger and, well, you probably weren’t getting the ball until midway through the third quarter. And I’d make sure the pass was out of rhythm.

  And, although I had no idea what the nuns at St. Barts did when they weren’t teaching us about quadratic equations and the spiritual benefits of natural family planning—complete with surprisingly graphic diagrams and pie charts about the rhythm method—I strongly doubt they were slipping niggers into casual conversations at the rectory pool tables. I had myriad fantasies about what the nuns did in their spare time. Gambling on hockey games, spelunking at Laurel Highlands, spades tournaments in Homewood; you name it, I daydreamed it. Still, I just couldn’t picture Sister Mary Margaret throwing back a Miller High Life while sprawled on a musty futon—her veil swinging from a ceiling fan, her black utility shoes splayed on a mostly empty bag of Purina Cat Chow—and opining on how niggers made her teeth itch.

  This nigger-less existence continued through high school. The suburban Penn Hills Senior High was much larger and blacker than St. Barts. I had multiple black classmates and basketball teammates and there was even a rumor that there was a black teacher actually teaching there somewhere. And this wasn’t a school with much apparent racial tension. The black kids and the white kids generally got along, united in a collective love of $1.04 Whoppers from the Burger King on Frankstown Road and a collective hate of Woodland Hills High School and Silkk the Shocker. This just was not an optimal setting for nigger use and usage. It was definitely subprime nigger. By the end of my junior year, I realized that if I wanted to be called a nigger before I graduated, I’d probably have to transfer.

  Still, despite these very obvious conditions that cultivated this increasingly surreal nigger void—and despite the fact that, traditionally, actually being called a nigger tends to suck—I felt ambivalent and insecure about it. Did I want to be called a nigger? No! Well . . . not really. I just, I don’t know. I didn’t want to be called one. But I didn’t want to not be called one either.

  Most of my friends had their own “this is what happened when that white boy called me a nigger” stories too. And these were amazing stories. Some involved the type of witty and pithy off-the-cuff comebacks it would have taken me months to think of. (“Maybe I’m a nigger today, but you’ll be ugly forever, bitch.”) Some involved teachable moments right out of an eighties-sitcom Very Special Episode. (“After she called me a nigger, I grabbed her hand, peered into her soul, and said a prayer for her. And then she prayed with me.”) But most involved fights. Glorious and violent fights.

  Brian had one, which he shared with me while playing Tecmo Super Bowl in my bedroom. “Yo, Dame, I had to beat this little white nigga’s ass at the busway yesterday for calling me a nigger.”

  My homeboy Frankie had one. “This crew of white boys called me a nigger at the mall, and I chased them out the food court with an empty Clarks Wallabees box and a stale funnel cake.”