Losing My Cool by Thomas Chatterton Williams Read Free Book Online

still have to study one-on-one with him—same as I always had. I knew that I could make the team at either school, so I leaped at the opportunity, finally, to surround myself with other black kids—specifically black girls—and chose to go to Union Catholic.

CHAPTER THREE
    What About Your Friends?
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    I was standing at my locker one morning when a tall, thickset girl named Takira came flying down the hallway like a whirling dervish. “Y’all, you know what day it is today, right?” she said, panting.
    â€œNo, what?” someone asked.
    â€œIt’s the anniversary of Biggie’s death, y’all,” she said.
    â€œOh, true,” someone else said.
    â€œWord, throw down some ice for the nicest MC, yo,” said another with an air of solemnity.
    â€œMake sure you remember to keep him in your prayers, everybody, for real,” Takira said as the bell rang for first period and we each went our separate ways. I think I heard someone say that they missed him.
    Even as a teenager immersed in Yo! MTV Raps, the absurdity of this exchange nagged at me. Here we were, a bunch of young black private-school kids, not wealthy but also not poor, who were unable to identify the year (the decade?) that W.E.B. Du Bois or Thurgood Marshall died, and who could not say for certain the date of Martin Luther King’s birth without the aid of a calendar—and this only because it was also a day off from school—yet here we were, serious as cancer when it came to things like sanctifying the anniversary of “the assassination of Biggie Smalls.” And like our parents’ generation with Dr. King, we knew exactly where we were the moment we learned the rapper had died. (I was on the couch in my bedroom, talking on the phone.) Everybody assembled at this impromptu B.I.G. vigil could recite at will whole songs and interludes from Ready to Die and Life After Death, and I was no exception. I was just as besotted with Biggie as my classmates were. Yet I was also torn between allegiance to the fallen drug dealer and something else—something coming from deep in the back of my head or in my conscience. I knew for an irrefutable fact that none of the other kids I was looking at had ever managed to crease the spine of The Autobiography of Malcolm X or The Souls of Black Folk . I’d only creased them myself because Pappy made me. Toni Morrison, if anything, triggered some blurry image of Oprah Winfrey in our minds. No one, including me, could put a finger on the difference between a Miles Davis number and one by John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk. We were as ignorant of jazz as we were of the blues or black literature. Most of us could not say who the key figures of the Harlem Renaissance were.Thoughts like these flickered in my mind as I listened to Takira, and for a second—for the flash of a second, as I studied the gravity of expression playing across my classmates’ faces—I felt a pang of shame as I heard Pappy’s voice say, Son, I don’t care if we ever have another black entertainer. In that moment I knew that he was right.
    Most of the time, however, I did not question what I saw or heard. Hip-hop style and culture governed everything at Union Catholic, same as it did on the playground and in the barbershop, and by this point I didn’t just do as the locals did—I was a proper Roman when in Rome. I ceased entirely to hang out with the white kids I knew from Holy Trinity and plunged myself like a diver into an all-black-and-Latino social circle. Some of my new friends were middle-class like me and some had parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles who busted their asses to get their children’s asses bused out of the working-class and inner-city communities in which they lived. Most of these latter students came from places that were tougher than burlap, places that made the local news, such as Plainfield, Irvington, and