I was standing with five other people in the desert-dusty backyard of a small stucco house with a big garden, looking up into a towering elm tree, where Darren, a thin, muscular guy, was hanging our radio antenna. The ragtag group assembled here ran a pirate radio station, and because the station was illegal and the FCC had targeted similar operations, we changed our location every week, and the area that our signal could cover was proportional to how high someone could climb in a tree, and Darren, a train-hopping Earth First! environmentalist radical, could climb higher than anyone else.
A lot of people I knew in college were online by this point, but I had never been on the internet, and most of the Luddites gathered around in that yard hadn’t either. We were engaged in an old-school form of media sabotage—or “taking back the commons” as Bruce, one of the guys who ran the station, put it. Our crew was made up of seed savers, foragers, Earth Firsters, and other refugees from mainstream white America. And we were all white except for one American Indian named Roger, who came around sometimes.
Most of the band of rebels just wanted to play punk rock and say cuss words on the air. The Drunk & Stoned Hour, from midnight until 1:00 a.m., when we went off the air, was probably the most popular show. I occasionally played sets of free jazz and other “out” music, but I was trying to get us to do political programming more like Democracy Now!, which I listened to on public radio.
That’s where I’d heard about Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Black Philadelphia journalist who had been convicted of murdering a white cop and sentenced to death in 1982. Philadelphia’s governor had recently signed Abu-Jamal’s death warrant, and there was an intense and concerted push to stop the execution that was, as far as I could tell, led by a woman named Pam Africa, who was part of the MOVE family, whose house the Philadelphia police had bombed, killing eleven people and burning sixty-four houses, in 1985. I wanted to get her on our station.
Darren climbed down the tree, his pink face sweating with the effort. He had started the station, learning how to broadcast and getting a transmitter from Free Radio Berkeley, a group that was trying to spread the movement and had given a transmitter like ours to the Zapatista revolutionaries in Chiapas, Mexico.
“Hey, man, what’s up?” he said when he saw me.
He’d just come back from Mexico on a freight train he’d hopped, explaining that he went somewhere every spring because his allergies were too bad in New Mexico during April.
“I was thinking that I might try to call up Pam Africa, from MOVE, and ask her about the Mumia case,” I said. “You think it would be cool to play something like that?”
“It would be great,” he said. “Some of the people might not love it. But we’ll cut it up with some Public Enemy and Last Poets and it will be cool. We should have a regular segment of stuff like that.”
The next day, I rode my bicycle to a RadioShack and bought a suction cup I could put on the headset of my phone to record a call. I set it up and did a test call to Dad.
“Hey,” I said.
“Baseball,” he said. “Good to hear from you.”
“I’m recording you,” I said.
“What?” he said.
“I bought a thing to record calls because I’m going to do some interviews for the radio, and I want to test it.”
“Radio! That’s great,” he said. “What station?”
“Ninety point nine,” I said, deciding not to tell him it was an illegal station.
“Who are you interviewing?” he asked.
“Pam Africa, from a group called MOVE—”
“Those damn radicals in Philadelphia,” he said. “I remember all that. Why would you interview them? I thought they were all dead or in jail.”
“There’s a journalist who covered their earlier standoff with police, and the cops framed him for a murder, and the governor just signed his death warrant,” I said.
“Oh Lord,” he said. “And you’re going on the radio with all that?”
“You know it’s true,” I said, “if you remember seeing it. They dropped a bomb on those people’s house. How is that different than Ruby Ridge or Waco or those things you complain about?”
“Because Bill Clinton killed the people in Ruby Ridge and Waco,” he said.
As I moved further left, embracing the antiglobalization movement, Dad kept moving to the right. He loved Newt Gingrich, the radical-right Georgia Republican who had taken over as Speaker of the House after the 1994 election, and his Contract with America. For Dad, Bill and Hillary Clinton symbolized everything that was wrong with America, even as they moved to end the welfare system that he had spent a lot of the last fifteen years complaining about.
“I’m sure you think O. J. is innocent too,” he said.
“Everybody was focused on O. J. because he was a famous athlete, but we should be focusing on Mumia,” I said.
I stood, frustrated by Dad’s stubbornness, watching a skateboarder glide by on the street outside my window.
“I gotta go,” I said. “It’s long distance and I have to do an interview.”
“I’ll call you soon,” he said. “I wanted to see if you wanted to go with me and get anything from Mother’s house at Edisto this Christmas, before we sell it.”
“So you are selling it,” I said. “Michael knew it. I guess greed is good.”
I hung up the phone.
I was annoyed with Dad and all his brothers. They cared more about money than family, I thought. My great-grandparents had owned hundreds of acres, but because male children had inherited all the real wealth, Grandmother hadn’t gotten anything but that beach house to start with. And now that would be gone too. I felt that I had, somehow, been cheated out of my inheritance. But it also seemed that losing this last little piece of land, the beach house where the Woods brothers congregated, would mean the end of the extended Woods family as a unit.
At least if the family was over, I didn’t need to worry about going back home to visit too often, and I could continue with my life out here in the desert. Things were going well. I had gotten a great job at the university tutoring Greek and Latin, where I was available in the library for twenty hours a week and got paid whether anyone came to be tutored or not, and so I mostly wandered the stacks. I also ran the campus Green Party and was involved in various forms of activism.
I dialed the number I had for Pam Africa in the Free Mumia campaign.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hi, my name is Bay Woods, and I’m with Rebel Radio 90.9 in Albuquerque, and I was hoping to interview you about new developments in the case,” I said.
“I’m busy,” she said. “You can hear the kids in the background. But I can give you a minute. What’s your question?”
“What should people be aware of in the fight for Mumia Abu-Jamal’s freedom?”
That was the only question I got to ask. For the next ninety minutes, Africa schooled me, going through nearly every detail of the case, from 1981, when a police officer named Faulkner was shot and Mumia was arrested, up to the appeal of his death warrant in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
As she spoke, I jotted down notes and watched as the tape rolled from left to right. When the tape ran out, I flipped it over to the other side and hit record again, as fast as I could.
Now Africa was explaining the MOVE family and why the police in Philadelphia had been so frightened of the group’s self-reliance that they’d bombed them. Mumia and the bombing were all tied together, and that’s why she and the rest of the MOVE family were fighting to free Mumia.
“Is that enough?” she asked as the second side of my tape wound down.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “That was amazing.”
She hung up the phone and I sat there, stunned. It was the first interview I’d ever conducted, and even if I’d only gotten in one question, that was all I needed. I had made the call. I was learning about the world directly. By asking the people involved, instead of, like Dad, hearing it from Rush Limbaugh. And I had recorded it and would play it on the radio, counteracting Limbaugh even if we could transmit only in the area we called the “student ghetto” surrounding the university.
The next Tuesday—we only broadcast once a week, because of the logistical difficulties caused by the illegality of the station—we aired the interview, cut up, as Darren had suggested, with Public Enemy and the Last Poets. I was kind of annoyed at this concession to music and, in the kitchen of the house we were using that week, I mentioned it to him.
“Why do we have to dumb it down with music?” I asked.
“Well, look,” he said, his hair newly shaved into something sort of like a mohawk. “It’s a really long conversation, and, you know, people are coming on to get a variety of stuff and mostly to hear music. You can contextualize it, and we’ll keep playing the tunes, and it’s cool. I’d love to see more like this. But also, if I’m gonna tell you the truth, the audio quality just sucks, and it’s gotta get better to air.”
I hadn’t even thought about how it sounded. I’d just known there was knowledge there, wisdom, and I’d wanted to share it. But as soon as he said it, I realized that the interview was obviously almost inaudible over the airwaves. I felt the shame that comes with a lack of skill.
But it didn’t matter. That feeling passed. We were all learning at our makeshift station. But something more permanent had clicked in me, something that would later prove formative.
The interview with Pam Africa had made me reconsider my views on racism and its prevalence in society, which I had always considered minimal and limited to people like Glenn, my old skinhead friend, or his hero David Duke. But listening to Africa talk, I could see how deeply racism affected the world, especially when it came to police. They were able to bomb a Black neighborhood and I’d never even heard of it? With a real bomb? That was crazy.
I didn’t wonder so much if I would have done time in Greenville if I’d been Black—the answer to that was most certainly yes—but whether I would have survived at all.
As I thought about my conversation with Pam Africa, my whiteness began to eat at me. I hadn’t felt this way since I began reading feminist writers who filled me with a deep sense of uneasiness about my masculinity.
I could see how much violence and coercion were required to make me masculine, and I figured the same was true of my whiteness. I wanted to be anything but a straight white man.
One cold night, furtive and nervous, I went to the only gay bar I knew of in the city. I walked in and ordered a drink and stood at the bar. It was dark, and there were purple neon strips along the bar. A few men moved around the dance floor. No one spoke to me, and I left after that first drink.
I told a few friends that I thought I might be bi and one of them, a redheaded woman named Nora, who started photographing me in dresses, said she knew of a great guy I should meet. He was a graphic artist and he was also from South Carolina, one of two queer brothers from the small town of Seneca, which was near Greenville, so we met up one night for a drink.
We had a couple gin and tonics at a place on Central called the Anodyne where I often drank, but our conversation was stilted and slow. He was very shy, with long, straight brown hair parted in the middle so that sometimes it fell forward and covered his face. He wasn’t my type, if I even had a type of guy, but after the second drink, we were walking down Central, holding hands.
“I hate South Carolina,” I said. “Except for Edisto. And my family has betrayed its connection to the island, so I don’t know if I’ll ever go there again.”
“I really love Seneca,” he said. “There were the rednecks and stuff, but mostly people were nice and it was beautiful. I miss the green.”
He sounded so sweet, his voice soft and lilting with a real rural up-country accent, but he was naive. How could he love a place like Seneca, South Carolina, which, except for being named after a Roman philosopher, was even shittier than Greenville?
We went to his apartment, which he shared with his brother, and we stood in the poorly lit living room until he said, “Why don’t you kiss me?”
I did. I’d drunkenly kissed guys a few times before, and I was always stunned by the roughness of the male face; even with this guy who seemed to barely have a trace of a beard, I felt it scratching me. We fell into a fever in his bed and jerked and sucked each other off quickly. I got up and got dressed.
“You’re not staying?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
I walked out the door, my face burning. It had been kind of fun but very forced, and I was worse to this sweet kid than I was to any of the women I went out with. Mainly, as I left, I felt good because my dick was much bigger than his. Objectification didn’t really have to do with who I was fucking, I realized, it had to do with me.
I had confirmed, to my disappointment, that I wasn’t queer, and I was no closer to solving the problem of how to deal with sex and relationships than I had been before I’d put the dude’s dick in my mouth.
I was, I had confirmed, a straight white man, a fact that presented itself now as an ethical problem. I would have to learn to deal with that—even though I had no idea of how to even start.
A few nights later, I went over to Nora’s house, where she lived with my old roommate and classics classmate Uli. She had an old friend in from out of town. We’d been drinking and talking and arguing, and it seemed to be going well. Nora and her friend went back into the bedroom and were catching up, I reckoned, as Uli and I sat in the living room.
“Can I see you outside?” Nora asked, coming in from the back of the house.
She had red hair parted starkly to one side and was wearing a surplus green army jacket. I felt a hint of exhilaration walking out the door because I thought she was going to tell me her friend liked me.
We stepped outside into the windy spring night and stood under the green light bulb on the porch.
“The way you treated me when we were talking in there is not OK,” she said.
“What?” I said, stunned.
A big gray moth fluttered toward the light behind us, flapping drunkenly between us.
“We were talking about something I know about, and you wouldn’t even let me finish a sentence and just kept going on and on, even though you don’t know anything about it,” she said, her green eyes gleaming. “It really upset me, and I don’t want to do it anymore, and I don’t think we can be friends if you don’t change that.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said.
I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t go back inside but just turned away and walked down the steps. I twisted to look at her just as the door slammed. The moth flittered around the light.
I knew she was right. I had gotten into that same old argumentative endgame mode that clicked and made me ready to rhetorically annihilate anyone for anything, for the “sake of the argument,” but it was so common, had become such a part of my wiring, that I hadn’t even noticed it. I believed the world should listen to me.
As I kicked along through the dusty, unpaved alley in the wind, I felt all the confusion and despair about trying to be a better person well up around me and erupt in a sandstorm inside my brain.
It wasn’t so much that I had been a dick to Nora as that I had not had any idea I was being a dick. I had been so clueless about my own appearance to others, so wrapped up in myself, that I’d thought she was asking me on the porch to tell me her friend liked me instead of seeing that she was so hurt she no longer wanted to be friends with me. I had no idea how I could be so clueless, and I started to cry, small, dry little desert tears, lamenting the human condition, the impossibility of actually knowing ourselves as others know us, as much as I bemoaned my own idiocy.
I thought about my interview with Pam Africa. I hadn’t had to argue back with her. I hadn’t had to say anything for the sake of the argument. All I’d had to do was listen and she’d opened up the world as it appeared to her, so different from how it had appeared to me.
I realized then that was also what Socrates had tried to do. Despite my turn toward left-wing politics, I was still deeply involved in the study of classics and philosophy. I began to think I should do more interviews, engage with people in order to see how the world appeared to them. Maybe that would be a way to save myself from myself.
But not long after that, the FCC raided the house where we were broadcasting and fined everyone there $10,000. I’d just left and wasn’t caught up in the snare, but I hadn’t done any more interviews yet, and I realized Rebel Radio was not the right platform for what I had in mind.
I wondered if the FCC had let the broadcasts go on until I started airing MOVE and then decided to raid us, indulging my old taste for paranoia. Even if that wasn’t true, I thought, why risk it when no one really liked my interview anyway? I wasn’t going to get arrested so a crust punk could say fuck on the radio, so I drifted away from that group and started writing a political column for the school paper, where I attacked corporations on campus, the ROTC and other forms of militarization, and the fraternity system.
The tutoring center in the library offered me a fellowship to run the language program as a grad student, and the Classics Department said if I stayed and got a master’s in comparative literature, I could teach intro Greek and Latin courses. So my graduation was definitely, as the etymology suggests, a step up, rather than a radical departure.
I’d been in college for six years already, and it was finally time to graduate. Mom, Dad, and Nanny all flew out to Albuquerque to watch me walk, since I had not been allowed to attend my high school graduation. It was a small December graduation, which made it all easier, with fewer students and less pomp and circumstance.
“It’s unbelievable,” Dad said as I drove them to the motel from the airport. “You go from getting all F’s to summa cum laude.”
“I always told you how smart you were,” Mom said.
I laughed because I felt as if they were trying to ruin it for me by forcing me to feel as if I had finally come around to their side, when I didn’t care much about the honor or even about graduating. But I was looking forward to making more money and getting entirely off the family dole. College there had been cheap—about a thousand a semester when I started—and Pell Grants had gone a long way toward tuition and books, but Mom and Dad had helped round that out and covered my rent. And Nanny had put away money every year since I had been born for a college fund, which I had burned through. I’d never thought any further than “from my family” when considering where that money came from. My critiques of capitalism never went quite far enough to see how inherited wealth and privilege had made their way down to me. But I did feel that between teaching and running the tutoring program, I would get out from under my family’s weight.
I drove them to the hotel near the airport. A sign we passed had the words white water on it, and Dad made a joke about Bill Clinton, who had been under what seemed like an eternal investigation over a real estate deal that bore the same name.
“I don’t know why you always act like I’m a fan of Bill Clinton,” I said. “I am a Green. I don’t believe in the two-party system. I hate both of the corporate-controlled parties. And Clinton is dropping bombs on Iraq right now.”
“That’s the only good thing he has done,” Dad said. “Why have a no-fly zone if you’re not going to enforce it?”
“OK,” Mom said. “Enough, you two. It’s a happy occasion. It’s your graduation and it’s Christmastime and we’re here.”
“All right, all right,” Dad said.
“I’ll pick y’all up at noon,” I said. “For the ceremony.”
“You got your cap and gown?” Mom asked.
“Yes,” I said, exasperated.
“We will be so proud,” she said.
That night I cut a piece of poster board so that it fit the top of my red satin cap. On it I wrote “Peace on Earth?”
I kept it hidden beneath my robes the next day, until just before we walked into the auditorium. Then I taped it to the top of my hat as a hundred or so students filed into the basketball auditorium, surrounded by friends and family looking down from the stadium seating. I heard the blond girl walking behind me in the honors section give out a little huff when she saw it, but otherwise I couldn’t sense any response to my query, which I intended as a protest against Clinton’s bombing campaign and a rejoinder to Mom and Dad in our discussion of it the night before.
We all sat down. And then something happened that I had not taken into account. The announcer asked us to rise for the national anthem. I hadn’t been to a big event like this in so long that I’d almost forgotten the national anthem was a thing. But I couldn’t just stand up while we were bombing. And even if we hadn’t been, I fully believed that America was an imperialist power and was not going to stand up for some jingoistic song.
As the red robes rustled and straightened around me with a soft, rolling swoosh, I remained seated.
“O say can you see,” the singer started as the graduates removed their caps. Mine, with its sign, was the only one that remained on, and it felt as if every eye in the place were on me, and the seconds ticked away with the rhythm of the horrible song and seemed to slow with each beat so that I blushed the color of my robe until the tune was done and everyone finally sat down, joining me. I could feel the hatred all around me still, but the moment was over, and I felt proud.
“I can’t believe you did that,” Dad said when I met them in front of the auditorium after the ceremony.
“Did what?” I asked. “Graduated summa cum laude?”
“Didn’t stand during the anthem,” Mom said.
“With that sign on your hat,” Dad said.
Nanny was silent.
“What was that supposed to mean?” Mom asked.
“What?”
“The sign,” Nanny said.
“We’re saying ‘goodwill and peace on Earth’ and celebrating the pacifist Jesus at a time when we are bombing other people, and we just pretend it’s not happening,” I said. “To me that seems hypocritical.”
“No,” Dad said. “Hypocritical is Al Gore preaching about the environment while flying around on Air Force Two.”
“I wish you didn’t have to make that point right then,” Mom said. “The people in front of us were talking about you, and I wanted to bop them—even if I would have felt the same way if it was someone else doing it.”
“You always told me to stand up for what I believed in,” I said. “Even if it wasn’t popular.”
“Right,” Dad said. “We taught you to stand up. And you stayed seated.”
“Ha ha,” I said sarcastically.
I had a small party that night, and Mom and Dad met a few of my other friends. I heard Dad telling Uli that he was going to go to Key West and win the Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest next year.
“You really should enter it, Papa,” I said, walking up to them.
“I was just telling Uli that I’m going to win it next year,” he said.
“The beard is a lot better than your mustache was,” I said.
“Hemingway had a mustache when he was younger too,” he said.
“That’s the writing of his I like,” I said. “The early short stories.”
“I tried to listen to one of his books recently, and the sentences were just too long to follow,” Dad said.
Dad listened to a lot of books on tape, but he didn’t really like Hemingway the writer; he liked Hemingway the image. But whether Dad had read Hemingway or just absorbed the spirit of it, the ethos the author had created through his characters defined some of the qualities that Dad and I shared. Hemingway, I thought, had framed white masculinity for several generations of American men, including Dad and me.
For all our differences, Dad and I both thought we had the inside scoop on things, knowing either the cheapest or the best or the rarest options; we both thought we could handle ourselves well in a variety of situations, especially emergencies; and we both thought we deserved to be heard, and that whatever we had to say was not only important, but more important than what the other person had to say. We believed we had experienced the world; believed we could hold our liquor; thought ourselves above average in bed; and took a certain pleasure in noticing the mistakes of others, while refusing to see the most obvious in ourselves. These attitudes were not just idiosyncrasies but our cultural inheritance as twentieth-century white men on the cusp of the twenty-first.
Our differences, I realized with some horror, amounted to matters of style. In terms of our basic engagement with the world, the way we moved through it and interacted with other people, we were, without a doubt, both white dudes.