Free Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach Page B

is Huey now?” he asked softly.
    “Not on the curriculum at Princeton-Eastham Prep, that’s for damn sure.”
    “But he’s on yours. And if you can get what you need from P-E and still keep your priorities in order, that’s a revolutionary move. Not running around screaming ‘Rodney King’ until somebody zaps you with a tazer. This war isn’t gonna be fought in the streets, Nique. Revolutionary thrills without revolutionary skills will get you killed.”
    It was a line that had been floating around the community for forty years, and Nique felt as histrionic hearing it as Dennis did saying it. Nique shot his father a look far from acquiescence, a shade short of defiance. Only in the past few months had he dared turn such eyes on his pops. It was a development that was not lost on Dennis.
    He rejoined his son on the couch, sitting farther away this time. “I spoke to Andre’s mother on the phone,” he said. “After school tomorrow, you’ll go home with him. I’d rather have you there than here until things cool down.”
    Dominique scowled. “I’m not allowed to come home?”
    “Not through a war zone, no. This time tomorrow they’ll have called in troops.”
    “And what about you?”
    “I’m gonna work from home tomorrow.”
    “Can’t I just stay home from school?”
    “No.”
    Nique stood up, walked to his room, and slammed the door. He lay on his bed, imagined the mood tomorrow at school, and shuddered in distaste. The skylights built into the ceilings of the forty-million-dollar main campus building allowed plenty of sunlight to filter in, but they blocked rage. The riots would be just another current-events quiz to his classmates. They’d slouch placidly in their seats and it would be business as usual. He and Dre would try to sit by themselves in the cafeteria, hunched over their trays, and as soon as they began to talk, some goofy white kid, one of their friends, would plop down next to them and start flapping his gums about the Lakers game or some chick he wanted to bone.
    Nique didn’t think he could handle the burden of acting like everything was cool tomorrow. He didn’t remember Emmett Till like Pop did; this was the sharpest slap justice had taken in his lifetime. He wanted to cry and lash out, but most of all he couldn’t stand to be alone, to sit at his desk or in the living room with Pop, watching the violence on TV in grim, hot silence. He wished he could sleep for a week, wake up and stretch like a cat in the sun and have all this over with. And yet he never wanted to forget this feeling of impotent, sad, restless fury.
    Nique turned onto his back, hid his face in his elbow crook, and let imagination place him in the middle of it all, inside the rage and release of the burning streets. Behind closed eyes he saw brotherhood surging, an army of black men roaring up and down the streets and him among them, one with every other newborn soldier, toppling cop cars and pumping fists in a synchronized instinctive dance clipped from a music video. He opened his eyes and sighed until his lungs were empty, feeling he was missing the defining moment of his generation, the call to arms, the fire.
    Nique stood up and flipped through his music collection, looking for a tape to listen to. His father scorned hip hop, but rap’s aural-ideological DNA helixed through Dennis’s record crates. His music was the raw material hip hop had diced and recycled, twisted and reformatted, thrown on a conveyor belt and squeezed through compressors, samplers, and sequencers. The black sounds of the seventies had been fattened for slaughter, intimidated and distorted, chopped and untuned and unkeyed and unpitched, stripped like an abandoned car and rebuilt like a cyborg. Rappers raped music of its musicality, threw a few cents’ retribution and a deadpan nod of respect to its parents and then saddled up, riding the unholy metal-work contraption toward the apocalypse as it bucked and snorted fire underneath