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How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture
by Thomas Chatterton Williams
Book Reviewed by:
I must have really been staring at her, because all of a sudden I
noticed that she wasn’t aimlessly pacing back and forth anymore
but pointing and yelling specifically at our car. “What the fuck are
you staring at?” she howled. “You rich, white motherfuckers in your
Murr-say-deez, go the fuck home! You think you can just come and
watch us like you in a goddamn zoo?”
She was making a scene. Passersby in the street were taking
notice and looking at our car, too. That was a time when Benzes
were the shit and you had to be careful where you parked because
tough guys would pull off the little hood ornament and wear it
from a chain around their necks—ready-made jewelry. I was terribly
uncomfortable being the center of attention there in that backseat,
mentally pleading for the light to turn green. I was also
confused as hell. Who were these white people this woman kept
referring to? Was she talking about . . . us—was she talking about
me? Of course my mother was white, but I didn’t understand how
she could think I was white, too. After all, I was on the way that
very moment to have my hair cut at the only barbershop in the
area that would cut hair like mine—curly, nappy hair. The kind
that “didn’t move,” the kind of hair that disqualified me from getting
cuts at the white barbershop two blocks from my house. But this
woman was talking to me.
“Just ignore her,” my mother said, and finally we drove away. But
I couldn’t drive that woman’s angry face out of my head. She had
somehow stripped me of myself, taken something from me. I felt I
had to protect myself from ever feeling that kind of loss again.
When I stepped into the barbershop that day and every second
Saturday afterward, I was extra careful to pay attention to the other
black boys sitting inside, some with their uncles, some with their
fathers and brothers, some sitting all alone. These boys became
like models to me. I studied their postures and their screwfaces,
the unlaced purple and turquoise Filas on their feet, their mannerisms,
the way they slapped hands in the street. These boys would
never be singled out and dissed the way I had been. I decided I
wanted whatever it was that protected them.
Inside Unisex, it smelled deliciously of witch hazel and Barbasol,
and there were three long rows of cushioned seats facing five
swiveling barber’s chairs like bleachers in a gymnasium. There
was an old, fake-wood-paneled color television suspended from
the ceiling in the far back corner. If a bootlegged movie wasn’t
playing on the VCR, the TV stayed stuck on one channel in particular
the rest of the time, a channel I soon learned was called Black
Entertainment Television. At the time in the morning when I usually
came into the shop, the program Rap City would be showing.
These barbershop Rap City sessions were not my first exposure to
hip-hop music and culture, of course; I had been aware of it vaguely
through the tapes my brother brought home and played in his
bedroom. I don’t believe, though, that I had ever noticed BET before,
and in the strange, homogeneously black setting of Unisex
Hair Creationz and the city of Plainfield beyond it, the sight of this
all-black cable station mesmerized and awed me. Watching BET felt
cheap and even a little wrong on an intuitive level—my parents
wouldn’t admire most of what was shown; Pappy called it
minstrelsy—but the men and women in the videos didn’t just contend
for my attention, they demanded it, and I obliged them. They
were all so luridly sexual, so gaudily decked out, so physically confident with an oh-I-wish-a-nigga-would air of defiance, so defensively
assertive, I couldn’t pry my eyes away.
One morning, Ice-T’s “New Jack Hustler” video came on, and
though I didn’t know the meaning behind the title—or even
whether I liked what I was hearing—I knew for sure that the other
boys in the shop didn’t seem to question any of it, and I sensed
that I shouldn’t, either. All of them knew the words to the song and
some rapped along to it convincingly. I paid attention to the slang
they were using and decided I had better learn it myself. Terms like
“nigga” and “bitch” were embedded in my thought process, and I
was consciously aware for the first time that it wasn’t enough just
to know the lexicon. There was also a certain way of moving and
gesticulating that went with whatever was being said, a silent body
language that everybody seemed to speak and understand, whether
rapping or chatting, which I would need to get down, too. Over the
weeks and months that followed, as I became more and more
adept at mimicking and projecting blackness the BET way, and
while it was all still fresh to me, what struck me most about this
new behavior was how far it veered not just from that of my white
classmates and friends at Holy Trinity, but also from that of my father
and the two older black barbers in the barbershop—sharp
men who looked out of place in Unisex and who held the door
and brushed parts on the sides of their heads.
Excerpted from Losing My Cool by Thomas Chatterton Williams. Copyright © 2010 by Thomas Chatterton Williams. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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