Chapter Five

SIMPLE BEAUTY

… THE VAGUE DREAM OF RIGHTEOUSNESS, THE MYSTERY OF KNOWING; BUT TO-DAY THE DANGER IS THAT THESE IDEALS, WITH THEIR SIMPLE BEAUTY AND WEIRD INSPIRATION, WILL SUDDENLY SINK TO A QUESTION OF CASH AND A LUST FOR GOLD.

—“Of the Wings of Atalanta”

Like most normal teenage girls, I was pretty obsessed with boys during high school and the early years of college. Because those years also coincided with the onset of my racial consciousness, and because the only black relation I’ve ever known to be authentic is a black man, my birth father, I have subsequently made heavy association between blackness and men.

My black birth father existed in a world frozen in time, 1960s America, when he was identified and stereotyped by popular culture and the media for both the danger and allure of his alleged sexual prurience. All I ever heard about him from Tess was that he was a player, a womanizer, aiming to cross over and sell out, using every bit of what labeled him in the first place—that he seduced white women with his suave looks and muscular build, passing smoothly through and among them as some sort of trophy buck. My birth mother also told me that all my birth father ever really wanted was fame and wealth. Neither of which, sadly, did he ever achieve.

In the essay “Of the Wings of Atalanta,” Du Bois considers variants of the “vague dream of righteousness” and the “simple beauty and weird inspiration” within the black world, and the chillingly predictive risk of downfall at the hands of lust and greed. As if to say: A genuine flicker of righteousness, a spell of indescribable splendor, and a jolt of the innately provocative existence of black people could and would disappear in seconds if those within the culture did not fast and accurately add these factors up to create a foundation—a foundation that would not yield to temptation.

Using the genre of magical realism—a genre that weaves realism and surrealism through narrative prose—writer Touré creates rich and powerful stories about black life that recognize and celebrate the factors Du Bois encouraged us to build upon a hundred years ago. Touré, who has said that he has been more so influenced by fiction than historical nonfiction, is an apostle of Du Bois not merely because he is a storyteller of tales righteous, beautiful, and weird but also because he, as Du Bois would have asked of any black man of his time, is a man who lives in the world he has created.

Touré

I’m more about fiction than sociology. The Souls of Black Folk has never spoken to me in the same way that great works of fiction have. Books like Invisible Man, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Song of Solomon are books I have fallen really hard for, like a lover. While I’m reading the book, I’m having the relationship, and it can feel like romantic love. But I think everybody gets a sense of what’s inside of Souls, because there’ve been so many books inspired by it and so many people moved by it. The book has been discussed and quoted so much, it’s something that’s in the air.

The magic realism that I use in The Portable Promised Land and my novel, Soul City, is a way of expressing blackness through my eyes. I see black people as so fresh and beautiful without even trying to be that I need a magic-tinged reality in my fiction to get all the beauty I see onto the page. When I walk around Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where I live, there’s a large group of us—a lot of black artists and black artistic people, people with style and selfconfidence. People walking down the street with some amazing strut, or some amazing outfit, not reacting to the white gaze at all. That’s our creativity, thought, money, time, and ingenuity all coming together to make this beautiful presentation of blackness. The way for me to explain that on the page is through magic—to exaggerate so that you can see all the beauty I see. My writing is certainly a reaction to black culture throughout its history, and throughout the country, but it’s also the specific, textural, and tangible relationship I have with the blackness I see in Fort Greene.

The way I first learned to write and interpret the world was through writing record reviews and then features, primarily for Rolling Stone, but also in other places. I always saw my job as expanding the complexity of the discussion of black hip-hop heroes. I knew they were deeper, more intelligent, more important, and more meaningful than they were being portrayed as in much of the media. Because I’ve been writing for Rolling Stone, I’ve been able to write about the kings of the industry—Tupac, Biggie, Snoop, D’Angelo, DMX, Jay-Z, 50 Cent. I’ve been fortunate to have this vantage on the industry for a few years.

When I’m interviewing these people, I am always wanting them to go deeper on what made them become who’ve they’ve become. You can’t just tell me, “Yeah, I’m the greatest.” I try to get them to analyze themselves, and to talk about the influences that made them who they are. That’s sometimes difficult in hip-hop, because nobody ever recognizes the influences. It’s always “It’s just me. I’m this good on my own.” I don’t know why that is.

The biggest problem I ever had was with Mary J. Blige—back during her My Life album. She was angry at everyone back then. But I also think she saw me as just this middle-class black kid from the New York Times, which I was then writing for, asking her questions that were just a little deeper than she wanted to go. Plus, we were in a limo going to the projects where she came from, which I think probably heightened the situation. But generally, there are never any problems. Part of the job of a journalist is to insinuate yourself into their world, to become one of the guys really quickly.

In my fiction, I want to entertain in the most vaunted sense of the word. I want to tell the most interesting stories possible. It’s a performance to me. In Soul City, I created a dominantly black city somewhere in America, a place where people are filled with magic, because I wanted to create a world in which white people are on the outside. They are central to so many of us so much of the time. But if you can throw off the white gaze, it’s an amazing experience. I mean, you need to get to a place where, if you feel like you want to have watermelon, just really feel like having that particular fruit, then you can walk into the middle of the Ritz and say, “Hey, man, I really just feel a need for watermelon deep in my soul.” And you know the white people at the next table are thinking, There go those Negroes with their watermelon again, but you don’t care. You can eat that watermelon at the Ritz without caring one bit. That’s fun. I don’t personally like watermelon, but that’s not the point. You have to rid yourself of the notion that what white people think or do is going to inform who you are or the way you act or dress. I don’t think that’s delusional; I think it’s delusional to go the other way. You’d go insane. Although I suppose many already have. I’m offering a panacea to that insanity.

I’m offering a world in my fiction that is primarily run and controlled by black people, where black people are central. They have problems, but their world does not fall apart in the end. This is not a political suggestion, or a prescription for modern America; it is a trip to a place that I have painted—a trip to Soul City. What I’m really trying to do, both in my work and in my life, with the subject of race is not to address it as a struggle, or a sociological issue, but, rather, as something cultural, something beautiful, something spiritual. It goes without saying that many black characters that appear in literature are not portrayed in a positive light. The characters in my work are happy and proud. They wear their blackness like a gold star.

It will be interesting to see what place race will have in our country as we move forward. Of course, it’s still a huge issue, and still divides us in so many ways, but now, in this decade, there are tremendous national issues that didn’t exist in the last decade. I think the issues of biracial Americans will become louder as time goes on, as that group grows larger and speaks about the complexity of race from their dual or multiple perspectives. I also see the issues of Arab Americans coming to the fore in a new way. Right now, they are the number-one niggers in America. I know a lot of black people who feel very literally like the noose has been loosened a little, as in: It’s a little less likely for me to get stopped while I’m driving my car, because I’m not Arab.

Don’t worry, black folks will go back to being the number-one niggers in America in due time. I have no doubt that the title will be retained. But, you know, for now, it’s like the heavyweight champion was knocked out by an upstart. Who would have thought it possible? For once, niggas ain’t the niggers of America. After four hundred consecutive years at number one, black folks are suddenly number two.