I Want To Be Black! - The Tale Of A Black Wannabee Guttered In The Ghetto

Bob Muzelle wanted to be black ever since he could remember.  Black men had so much cool, so much character, and so much sex. While the white people in his town dressed in dowdy wool suits and sensible shoes, black people cruised down Main Street in pink Cadillacs, top down, zoot-suited up to beat the band, gold teeth sparkling in the May sunshine.  Black people announced, never introduced; strutted, never walked, had attitude rather than reserve.  'I want to be black', he said to his parents.

 

Of course, his parents who were as white, wealthy, conservative, and socially proper as could be, were nonplussed. 'What?', they exclaimed before they realized that the boy must be kidding, early adolescent sexual fantasies.  Stories of the hot times in Dark Town were common in those days - the black man's elephantine organ and women on their backs more than in the kitchen. 

These were the early 60s, so the Muzelles can be forgiven for their racial misconceptions and fantasies; but still, the very idea of their son, their only son wanting to be in the least like a black person was off-putting at best, and downright heinous and scandalous at worst.  

It needed no explanation, the nonsense that Bobby had come out with, and certainly merited no answer; but his parents' worries increased when he started pimp walking, a perfect rendition of the gangsta roll seen every day on Arch Street, and began wearing bling - nothing compared to the brothers across town, but not the J. Press and Brooks Bros. in his closet.  

Mrs. Muzelle had brought Bobby to Henry Miller, clothier to the wealthy in West Hartford, and let the man - always smartly dressed, perfectly tailored, and with that preppy, WASP way that so appealed to boarding school parents in New Brighton and Farmington - dress her son.  

Like Ralph Lauren, this icon of the Anglo-Saxon upper classes was a Jew, but he hiden it well. While many patrons suspected as much, they dismissed it as irrelevant.  After all Jews were tailors in the Warsaw ghetto, weren't they?

 

'Leave him to me, Mrs. Muzelle', Miller said, and an hour later the boy came out of the shop a fashion plate for the well-to-do; and now after so much proper care, he was wearing jacked-up clown suits and imitation gold chains???  

'Talk to the boy', Mrs. Muzelle said to her husband. 'Do something!; but it was all to no avail, and the unfortunate turn of events had to run its course.  And run it did, for one day Bobby came home, his clothes in tatters, a broken nose, and hair a mess.  He had been rolled by Pharaoh Washington and his home boys who wanted nothing better than to toss this white boy in the dumpster along with the chicken bones and rats to show him what life downtown was really like. 

Sniffling and snuffling, he had learned his lesson, but did not give up his intent.  The black man was still his idol, his mentor, his model.  Although he never tried to be black, there was nothing wrong with being with them, but the Lefferts School, a tony private boarding school did not accept 'people of color' and so he had to make do with occasional trips to Hartford just to have a look. 

Without distractions, Bob worked hard and was accepted to Yale along with fifteen of his classmates.  Lefferts was a feeder school for Yale, and application meant acceptance.  Yale trusted Lefferts to produce their kind of man. 

It was there that Bobby found himself.  It was a heady time, the cusp of the civil rights movement and he could meld his black idolatry with social justice, and on he went down to Selma and Montgomery to get his teeth bashed in by white racist thugs and to finally come into his own.  From that moment on the black man was to be his project, and raising him from the clutches of Jim Crow, poverty, and social misery was his goal. 

In the early days just showing up was enough of a bona fide to be accepted by black people - if white ofays wanted to shuck and jive in 'de Souf', let em.  Better their blood than ours said Pharoah Washington who by now had his own crewe, his own direct-to-Saigon H connections, and was a rich man. 'Dumb ass muthafucka', said Pharoah when one of his homies reminded him of the pukey little white boy they had tossed in the dumpster 

 'Stone white ass cracker muthafucka', said Pharoah, and bounced. 

The Making of a Progressive was Bob's unpublished memoir - a tale of righteousness, doing the right thing, and a lesson to white America.  In it he sang the praises of Pharoah Washington, the culture of Arch Street, the plight of the Southern black man, and the need for the fight to continue. La Lucha Continua was the Che Guevara banner he had hung on his dormitory room wall, carried with him to Little Rock, and mounted in his basement apartment on Dupont Circle.

Race was at the heart of modern progressivism, he wrote, the be-all-and-end-all of the struggle for social equality, the focal point around which every other social issue resolved.  'The Black Man is Everyman', he wrote. 

Although The Movement started as a racially integrated one - blacks and whites arm in arm marching across the Pettis Bridge, Martin and Ralph soon got coopted by Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael, and racial justice became 'a black thang'.  Feeling marginalized for the first time in his life - or rather the second if you count Arch Street and the dumpster - he was at sixes and sevens.  What was a purposeful, committed, progressive white man to do?

 

Worst of all just being white was a scourge.  No matter how long Bob's racial resume was; no matter how many beatings he had taken in Alabama, no matter how many stump speeches he had made, he still was still white Mister Charlie. 

Now, Bob, lily white to the core of his being, brought up in the finest, most attenuated white, Anglo-Saxon preserves in the nation, product of Lefferts, Yale, the Vineyard, and Nantucket, had to square all this with his desperate desire to be otherwise.  To be specific, to be as black as the ace of spades. 

Given his privileged background and singularly white upbringing, it was next to impossible to be with black women - that kinky hair, that wiry poontang, those lips - but he gave it his best, for next to being black, screwing black was the next best thing; so he held his nose and slept with LaShonda Phillips from Accounting, an affirmative action hire from Anacostia, Washington's most dismal and pestilential slum. 

She thought that Bob might be a meal ticket and buy her baubles or maybe a ticket to the Islands - a mark in other words, a con - but to Bob she was Earth Mother, representative of the primitive fecundity of the African forest; and even though sleeping with her was ever so distasteful, the meaning of it all helped him get through the night. 

When she told him she might be pregnant, Bob ditched her as fast as a speeding bullet, sent her back to the inner city without a second thought, wiped all traces of her from his diary, his phone, and his life.  It was one thing to bed one of them, but to father a child?  Never, not on his watch. 

LaShonda was no dope, and wasn't going to let him slip out of reach, so she played the pregnancy card, the race card, the brother-just-outta-Folsom card until Bob paid up and paid righteously.

 'How stupid could I have been?', he shouted at himself in the bathroom mirror; but when LaShonda had milked him enough and was tired of anything to do with this ofay cunt, she disappeared.  With a great sigh of relief, Bob joined the Yale Club and hung out with his crowd. 

If the black experience had been front and center of his life, the center of his political ambitions, and the very soul of his character; then where was he now?  A progressive without roots, a liberal without conviction, an absolute fool for having swallowed the whole charade hook, line, and sinker. 

'Thank God for Yale', he said to himself as he settled in front of the fire at the Yale Club, sipped a single malt and waited for his table and his date - a lovely mature woman whom he had first met at Vassar, taken to road houses in Poughkeepsie, and slept with at the Taft but given up once his Black Athena mentality had set in.  

 

Time has a way of tying up loose ends, and there she would be, and elegant widowed Georgetown matron, the perfect companion for his later years, a pristine white lady without a trace of desire for anything but Nantucket and Gstaad.  Ahh, Yale, he thought.