Free Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach Page A

He’d studied up and watched his father watch him, proud of his father’s pride. It was just the two of them, and Nique understood how much his father had at stake in raising his son.
    They went through Pop’s records on Sundays, Dominique DJing and Dennis sitting on the floor, back up against the couch, fingers interlaced behind his head, legs spread under the coffee table, telling Nique what songs to play and where to find each slab of vinyl. Dennis had been collecting albums for thirty years, and there were easily a thousand lined up in cream-colored milk crates along the base of the living-room wall, ordered according to a system only Dennis understood—really just randomness Nique’s pops had memorized.
    Dominique learned all the words, began to feel the dusty testaments belonged as much to him and his time as to his father and the past. They were streaked with power, these sonic artifacts; they came alive as soon as stylus hissed against vinyl: James Brown popcorn-strutting through the new new heavy jungle funk, chopping down whatever vegetation swayed before him with a
hah!
soul brother number-one machete:
I’m Black and I’m proud. Give
it up or turn it loose. I don’t want nothing from nobody. Open up
the door, I’ll get it myself.
The Last Poets standing on the runways of Babylon with flare guns to the skies to lure the revolution into landing:
black people, what y’all gonna do when you wake up and
find that you’re dead, with maggots and roaches eating the pus out
of your prostituted minds and white deathly hands massaging your
hearts with red-hot branding irons? Speak not of revolution unless
you are willing to eat rats to survive.
Albert Ayler clawing at the speakers, bleating and screeching, witches and devils swirling from his sweating horn bell and that white-heat beard streak shooting from his chin to lower lip like a bolt of lightning, electrifying the jacket photo.
    Dennis fisted his hands and propped them on his hips. “I remember the last time folks here tried this, Nique, in ’65. I watched black folks burn down their own neighborhoods, smash windows and grab TV sets out the white man’s stores and act like they were winning somehow. Brothers carrying stereos back to houses that are charcoal when they get there.”
    Dennis dropped his pose and went back to pacing the living room, glancing in turns at his son and out the window. “Here we are almost thirty years later, doing the same shit again. That makes me madder than the verdict. I knew those fools would get off, video or not. A black man versus six white cops? Please. I’m old enough to remember Emmett Till. Thought maybe folks would know better than to loot their own neighborhoods this time around, though.”
    “Nobody’s touching anything black-owned, Pop. Just the white stores and the Korean ones.”
    Dennis stopped pacing and screwed his eyes at Dominique. He never raised his voice; he never had to. Nique was a handful to everyone else, teachers and coaches and the like, but a stare from Dennis cut right through him. Andre and every other friend of Nique’s who’d spent time at the house thought Dennis should win Father of the Year.
    “Those stores are still in our part of town, Nique. You destroy them, how are folks supposed to eat next week? This is a party to you kids.” He swept his palm across the neighborhood. “We had a movement going. Cats were reading, organizing. We were talking revolution.”
    “And where did all that talking and reading and organizing get you, Pop?” Nique stabbed his chin at the window. “Like you said. Shit is still the same.”
    “The hell it is.” Dennis sat down so his leg touched Nique’s. “I got a son in one of the best preparatory schools in Los Angeles. Couple years you’ll be in college. You’re gonna have access, Dominique. That’s revolutionary.”
    “Huey woulda called it selling out.”
    Dennis stood and faced the window, folding his hands behind his back. “And where