JheNighll WasNobodUJohn Edgar WidemanJohn Edgar Wideman is a fiction writer who teaches at the Universityof Massachusetts lAmherst. His latestworksareTheSto~iesofJohn EdgarWideman and The Homewood Books. In this essay, written for the Novem-ber 1992 issue of McCaU's, Wideman narrates his handling of a poten-tially explosive racial incident arising from his wearing a Malcolm Xhat. .

A. ..1' "~...: July ~th, the 'fire:vorks day,.the da.yfor p..icnics ~nd pat.'.riotjc.·..speeches, IwasVIn ClOVIS, New Mexico, to watch my daughter, Jamila.and her team, the Central

~ Massachusetts Cougars, compete in the Junior Olympics Basketball nationaltourney. During our ten-day visit to Clovis the weather had been bizarre. Hailstoneslarge as golfballs, Torrents of rain flooding streets hubcap deep. Running throughpelting rain from their van to a gym, Jamila and several teammates crammingthrough a doorway hadlookedback just in.time to see a funnel cloud touch downa few blocks away. Continuous sheet lightning had shattered the horizon, cracklingforhours ni~l1tand day. Spectacular, off-the-charts weather flexing its muscles,reminding people what little control they have over their lives.

Hail rat-tat-tattirig against our windshield our first day in town wasn't exactlya warm welcome.but things got better fast. Clovis people were glad to see us andthe mini-spike wetriggered in the local economy. Hospitable.generous, our hostslavished upon us the same kind of hands-onaffection and attention to detail thathad transformed an unpromising place in the middle of nowhere into a verylivable community.

On top of an that,' the Cougars were. kickingbutt, so the night of July 3rd Iwanted to celebrate with a frozen margarita. I couldn't pry .anybody else awayfrom "Bubba's," themovablefeast of beer, chips and chatter the adults. travelingwith the Cougarsenprovisednightly in the King's Inn Motel parking lot, so Idreve.offalone tofindoneperfed ·m.argarita.

4 Inside the door of Kelley's bar and lounge I was flagged by a guy collectinga-coverchargeandtold I couldn't enter wearing my Malcolm Xhat. I asked why; theguy hesitated, conferred a moment with his partner, then declared that Malcolm Xhats were.against thedress code. For a split second 1 thought it might be thatno caps were allowed-inKelley's. But the door crew and two or three othershanging:aroundth:eehtranceway all wore the billed caps .ubiquitous in NewMexico.iduplicates of mine, except theirs sported the logos of feedstoresand truckstops iosteadefa silver X.

What·tareened.,through mvmind in the next couple of minutes is essentially I'J I.I,!.unsayablebut-inclnded scenes from my own half century of life as a black man, .

clips from five hundred years of black/whitemeetings on slave ships, auction 1blocks, -plantations, basketball' courts, in the Supreme Court's marble halls, in fbeds, back alleys and back rooms, kisses and lynch ropes and contracts for millions Jof dollars soa black face, will grace a cereal box. To tease away my angerI tried tjoking-with folks in ather, places. Hey, Spike Lee. That hat you gave mean theset of the Malcolm movie in Cairo ain't legal in Clovis.

But nothing about these white guys barring my way was really funny. Partof me wanted to get downanddirty. Curse the suckers. Were they prepared todo battle to keep me and my cap out? Another voice said-Be cool. Don'tsulleyour hands ..Walk away and caIl-tne,cops,oratl(i\\lYel-.:Forget tbese chumps: Suethe .owner . Or should I·'winjhearts"~rritd.,U1:1Illds?i~tk;)k~.'feUas,hund'erstandwhy'theX~on.my.cap mi:gh;t:{afi~tld;;{~~i'~4~~lYP~;i;~i;tL!~R,!"p)l;)i,lP~y;;d@**:}t:knowmuch' aboutM(tloGlO'1 . .The inc .trtkfng;;RiiSsouLBy the time hewa'S,;a~Si~s$i~atedhe~~~~~~~yi01ence. He was trying tomake.: &.i1n;S:eiof Am eFj 'e;bims€lf;Jree us from the cripplinglegacy' ,of .race hate4n.d:Qp.iife~~idn;">. .. .

Whfte;;~p of theabo,y.elQ~c,i!f1r~G'fujVm,t;nd;mybody, on its own, had assumedagu.Dfigat(n~:\s,vigitan~e;:~'haads;.{tead~tat sides, head cocked, weight poised, 'eyestigQt·i\rtdi;h~t;dJ;;nl\thef;tld~t~~,e!p.~r.;y.et.alertto anything stirring on theperiphery.ManyQ:filerv.~¢~~:qi'},~I3:\'Vm~e•...... '..."e·;cneckingoutthe entranceway} recogniaingthe 'in . i;:','bfHadn't they witnessed Los Angeles goingberserk>......... '~'tltlP:le months .ago? That truck 'driver beatennear:ly1x},r .... ." ..;~t;.,,t~os:.e·'pa·cks of black hoodlums burning and Iooting?Invisibielilhes).w~~~~··. i~£lrawnih the air, in the sand, invisible chips bristledon should~r:s'..

B The~s'!eather;agaitlrQurNne'rican racial weather, turbulent, unchanging' inits. changeability.its'p'ower to rock 'us and stun us' and, smack us fromourroutinesand tearus-apartassfsnone of our cities, our pieties)' our promises, our-dreams,ever stood'achanceof·hbiding·oq. The racial weather. Outsideus, tnen,suddeniy,unforgettably, untorgivingly,.inside;it~m:inding us of what we':veonl~ pretended

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to have forgotten. Our limits, our flaws. The lies and compromises we practiceto avoid dealing honestly with the contradictions of race. How dependent we areon luck to survive-when we survive-the racial weather.

One minute you're a person, the next moment somebody starts treating youas if you're not. Often it happens just that way, just that suddenly. Particularly ifyou are a black man in America. Race and racism are a force larger than individuals,more powerful than law or education or government or the church. a forceable to wipe these institutions away in the charged moments, minuscule ormountainous. when black and white come face to face. In Watts in 1965, or a fewless-than-glorious minutes in Clovis, New Mexico, on the eve of the day thatcommemorates our country's freedom, our inalienable right as a nation. as citi-zens, to life, liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness, those precepts and principlesthat still look good on paper but are often as worthless as a sheet of newspaperto protect you in a storm if you're a black man at the wrong time in the wrong place.

None of this is news, is it? Not July 3rd in Clovis, when a tiny misfire occurred,or yesterday in your town or tomorrow in mine. But haven't we made progress?Aren't things much better than they used to be? Hasn't enough been done?

We ask the wrong questions when we look around and see a handful offabulously wealthy black people, a few others entering the middle classes. Farmore striking than the positive changes are the abiding patterns and assumptionsthat have not changed. Not all black people are mired in social pathology, butthe bottom rung of the ladder of opportunity (and the space beneath the bottomrung) is still defined by the color of the people trapped there-·.····and many are stilltrapped there, no doubt about it, because their status was inherited, determinedgeneration after generation by blood, by color. Once, all black people were legallyexcluded from full participation in the mainstream. Then fewer. Now only some.But the mechanisms of disenfranchisement that originally separated AfricanAmericans from other Americans persist, if not legally, then in the apartheidmind-set, convictions and practices of the majority. The seeds sleep but don't die.Ten who suffer from exclusion today can become ten thousand tomorrow. Racialweather can change that quickly.

How would the bouncer have responded if I'd calmly declared: "This is a freecountry; I can wear any hat I choose'vWould he thank me for standing up forour shared birthright? Or would he have to admit, if pushed, that American rightsbelong only to some Americans, white Americans?

We didn't get that far in our conversation. We usually don't. The girls' facespulled me from the edge, girls of all colors, sizes, shapes, gritty kids bondingthrough hard clean competition. Weren't these guys who didn't like my X capkids too? Who did they think I wasr What did they think they were protecting? Ibacked out, backed down, climbed in my car and drove away from Kelley's. Afterall, I didn't want Kelley's. I wanted a frozen margarita and a mellow celebration.So I bought plenty of ice and the ingredients for a margarita and rejoined thefestivities at Bubba's. Everybody there volunteered to go back with me to Kelley's,but I didn't want to spoil the victory party, taint our daughters' accomplishments,erase the high marks Clovis had earned hosting us.

But 1haven't forgotten what happened in Kelley's. I write about it now because

this is my country} the country where my sons and daughterare"gfQw~pig~p,aI}:d,your daughters and sons, and the crisis, the. affliction,the sal'De-;,qr""~~~icg~,ewaste of life continues across the land, the nightmarishweath~rcE<~er,tsm~·':st?tbursts of misery in the dark. , " .:;.;,,:

.The statisticsof'inequality don't demonstrate a "blackcrisis"-.th:r!tp~~$l1tconfuses cause and victim, solutions and resPQnsibility.When.thejJ~lti":" .falls on us all. The bad news about blackmen=- that they die sooner,"a.~,., '.',Ieviolently than white men, are more ravaged byunemployment and lackdfJ)p~:al"tu~:nity, are more exposed to drugs, disease, broken families and policehr:tit~nty;more likely to go to jail thancollege, more cheated by the inertia and:caU914'&'$~~$.:of a government that represents and protects the most needy the least: .."fihis3';i~-,not a "black problem," butanationalshame} affecting us all. Wrenching etl't!s,~l~~~ffree from the Iong nightrnare. of racism will require collective deternlil1,at'i{)"~;fcountless.individualactsofwilkgutsy, informed, unselfish. To imagine thete:rtjQ~ecost of not healing ourselves, we must first imagine how good it wouldfeeltpbe healed.

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