A White Man Wants To Be Black And Father A Hundred Children - The Irresistible Allure Of Black Machismo

Harvey Stillson was an ordinary man living an ordinary life.  In it there was no drama, no outbursts, no recriminations.  It was a patiently constructed life, one of habit, order, and simple expectations. Yet Harvey was a profoundly unhappy man.  As he was approaching an age where more years were behind him than ahead, he had become restive, nervous, and jittery. 

'What on earth is wrong with you?, his wife asked, less out of concern for her husband than for upsetting the settled nature of the marriage - one which brooked no disruption, let alone random questioning of purpose, affection, or concern.  Besides, it was women who were supposed to keep their feelings to themselves, rarely confessional and hectored by badgering husbands not the reverse.  In short, this mopey, unresponsive man had become a problem. 

Harvey came by this resolved character naturally.  The son of a pharmacist and a homemaker in a socially respectable, complaisant family happy enough, economically secure enough, and healthy enough to steady the course, make no waves, keep to the shipping lanes, and always have a hold full of cargo. 

'A good boy', said Father Brophy, 'a very good boy', suggesting a vocation, the priesthood or a monastic life.  The Catholic Church always needed boys like Harvey, serious boys of sincere calling. 

His teachers were equally fond of the Stillson boy.  Such a patient, responsible student, a boy always to color between the lines, write neatly, and to come to school prepared.  'A promising future', they all agreed. 

And so it was that Harvey even before he left elementary school, had been fully formed.  Somehow and quite remarkably his moral compass already pointed to true north, his principles as foundational of those in the American Constitution, and his mind, body, and spirit in perfect alignment.

Not surprisingly his adult life followed the straight and narrow.  He was built for duty, responsibility, and patriotism and little could sway or deter him.  He chose a modest profession, a modestly attractive and intelligent wife, and a life of security.  Whether in his personal life, his financial investments, his job, or his leisure he was firmly located.  No one, especially he, ever wondered about Harvey Stillson. 

Which was why this unsettled, scratchy period was a surprise to his wife who had gotten used to his regularity and reassuring sameness.  Harvey himself didn't know exactly what was wrong except that nothing seemed right. There was nothing that teased him away, the tickled him, that even vaguely tempted him.  He felt like a silhouette, a stick figure, an imaginary number.  

The polite after-work highball turned into double martinis and Wild Turkey.  His work became addled and imprecise and his attentiveness to his wife, the garden, and his children's wellbeing went missing. He shambled. 

Now at the time American popular culture had gone black.  Thanks to diversity, equity, and inclusion, black faces were everywhere, selling dentifrice, Doritos, Toyotas, and Schwab.  They were a race apart on the hardwood floor and the gridiron.  They were in every television serial, every major Hollywood movie.  

They were all bling, machismo, randy sexuality, and in-and-out fatherhood - all of which was lionized by white people who saw this culture as particularly expressive and human, far more than white culture which had always been prim and prissy, all Chippendale, Townsend, and Revere or bass boat and gunrack. There was no soul to white culture, no exuberance, no....joy. 

The black man had come from the primal forests of Africa to America attuned to nature and the primitive callings of physicality, sexuality, and male dominance.  Yes, he had come to America as a slave, but that did nothing to suppress his native masculinity - something the white man had never had. 

Wilt Chamberlain, the former professional basketball player said that he had had sex with over a thousand women, at which confession he winked.  Of course it was more than that, and there were far too many children borne of those relationships that he could count.  He was exuberantly male, unapologetic, in his sexual prime and a model for all men. 

Of course he was reviled by the white community.  The cult of blackness had not yet come to the fore, and such sexuality had yet to become the expression of black identity that it was in Harvey's day. In fact such sexuality was considered a threat.  Why should black men confine their sexual ambitions to the ghetto, and wasn't the white woman the prize of all prizes? 

This sexual deviance was borne of tribal primitivism and encouraged by slave owners who were happy to see their stable of slaves increase. Sexual abandon was good for business, so it was no wonder than in a ghettoized society, insular, ingrown, and still rooted in African soil, Wilt Chamberlains abounded. 

Time passed, white opprobrium became adulation.  The black man was now recognized as the natural successor to the white man.  African tribalism and its profound link to the environment, the Earth, and humanity itself was to be realized for the determining factor in human society.  

While there were some who said that fatherless families were signs of social dysfunction, that single motherhood was not a social paradigm like any other, and that catch-as-catch-can civility was antithetical to a national ethos of responsibility, most white people embraced the idea of diversity in all its forms. 

Perhaps Harvey Stillson took the black thing too far when he said that he wanted to sleep with a thousand women and father hundreds of children; but he couldn't help himself.  Every cossetted nun, every admonishing priest, every hectoring, badgering teacher was his enemy.  They were the ones that put him into this sexual straightjacket, whittled his soul down to nothing, left him an emotional beggar, a shadow of a man. 

Of course opening up to a black sexuality is not as easy as it sounds.  White feminism had put a lid on sexual adventurism.  No Means No had become the ethos, intercourse became a reading of road signs, license and registration checked at stops along the way.  Serial partners or worse multiple contemporaneous partners was ipso facto condemning.  Men who had such primitive desires, ignoring women for who they were not just as sexual objects, should be tarred, feathered, and castrated. 

Only black men got away with this awful opprobrium.  The long knives stayed away from the ghetto, residents there were living their own, respected cultural identity.  White censure, rule, and slavery were things of the past. 

It is a tough thing to wake up in the morning realizing that you have been a eunuch all your life, whipped and collared by women, forced into sexual sedation, and now exile.  

Despite everything - the violence, rapes, murders, incivility, and dysfunction of the ghetto, Harvey still wanted to be black, to be left to his own sexual devices, to love as and when he wished, trapped and warned by no woman.  He wanted to strut, pimp walk, macho it up like a ghetto prince. 

Bad luck of the draw.  He was white, as white as white bread, milk, and flour.  He could be nothing but a clerk in a minor accounting firm, doing people's taxes, correcting balance sheets, straightening out accounts and deposits, BLTs for lunch, a ride on the N6 home, feet up on the ottoman, an early dinner. 

And all the while black men in the inner city were having a grand old time, smoking a spliff, drinking malt liquor on the stoop, and having sex with women in a different block of the projects every night of the week. 

'Shape up', said his wife now more than irritated at her slovenly husband who had come loose from his moorings, and God only knew what he would do next. 

Nothing of course.  The die had been cast decades ago when he was a boy growing up in New Brighton, set in stone from an early age, given no chance whatsoever to be black, stuck in perennial whiteness and fidelity.  He couldn't even get up the gumption to invite Amanda from HR for a drink.