Makes MeWanna Holler
Jacoby, Jeff
Makes Me Wanna Holler, The Odious Career of Nathan McCall By Jeff Jacoby When last we heard from Nathan McCall, he was joyfully beating an innocent white kid to a pulp. "We all took off after...
...Then, they sit back and watch us squirm—maybe that's why babies smile so much...
...And on death: The death of family members of friends is always a bummer...
...Every time I drove my foot into his balls, I felt better....We bloodied him so badly....We walked away, laughing, boasting...
...Finally there is McCall's hypocrisy...
...But language that adds vividness to a memoir can be clangingly awkward in an essay...
...And needless to say, it isn't only whites who experience that fear...
...In fearsome detail, McCall recounted the first "train" he took part in—a mass-raping of a frightened 13-year-old virgin named Vanessa...
...Can't she tell from your bearing that you're no rapist or thief...
...In a short essay titled "The Elevator Ride," McCall—writing in the second person, presumably of him-self—scornfully describes a white woman who (he imagines) is filled with fear and "racial suspicion" as she descends with him in an elevator...
...That's why Bill Bennett looks and sounds so out of place," McCall writes dismissively, "when he jumps into press conferences with C. DeLores Tucker...
...Of course she can't tell that...
...And on the bestseller list: Makes Me Wanna Holler drew rave reviews and sold a lot of copies...
...Can't she tell from your bearing that you're no rapist or thief...
...But it is staggering that McCall, of all people, has the nerve to condemn such people...
...It's so depressing you sometimes forget that death may have meaning and purpose...
...Especially gang rapes...
...And no moving prose: There is scarcely an affecting paragraph in the book...
...He is contemptuous of them...
...He moved from a mostly white Virginia suburb to the mostly black Maryland enclave of Prince George's County, he says, so he would be able to "step outdoors without worrying about being insulted by some arrogant white dude who thinks I'm after his wallet" or see "some old, blue-haired white lady clutching her bags when she sees me...
...McCall's truths are little indeed, and most of them, come to think of it, aren't true...
...It is page after page of banal commentary and tiresome, trite conclusions...
...Hoping, perhaps, to capture some of the immediacy that helped make his first book so compelling, McCall sprinkles this one with raw details and street argot...
...We all took off after him," he wrote on the first page of his 1994 memoir Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America...
...But What's Going On is verveless and driveless...
...Roughly 50 percent of the violent crime in America is committed by young black males, who make up perhaps 3 percent of the population...
...Instead, McCall went from prison to a state university, and from there to a career in journalism that eventually landed him on the Metro desk of the Washington Post...
...She's in the elevator with Nathan McCall, writer, reporter, rapist, thief...
...By his own (mostly unrepentant) reckoning, he is guilty of repeated acts of assault and battery, breaking and entering, assault with a deadly weapon, armed robbery, and attempted murder...
...From that chest-thumping start, McCall went on to describe a youth brimming with violent crime...
...He couldn't have been more than eight or nine...
...When white folks "discovered" America, it already belonged to somebody else...
...Whites decided they wanted it, so they took it...
...He serves up an insipid blend of Rainbow Coalition and Nation of Islam, but without Jesse's pumping oratory or Farrakhan's (deranged) flair...
...She seems filled with the wildly absurd terror that, in the brief ride between the 12th and 1st floors, this black man may rape her, rob her, and leave her for dead...
...It was about pussy...
...How could she...
...Stomped him and kicked him . . . kicked him in the head and face and watched the blood gush from his mouth . . . kicked him in the stomach and nuts, where I knew it would hurt...
...I think babies deliberately draw black adults and white adults into awkward racial predicaments...
...Especially of very Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for the Boston Globe...
...Muhammad Ali didn't just resist the draft in 1967—he "bucked white folks and refused to go to war...
...W]e called him Itchy Booty because somebody once caught him scratching the crack of his behind, scratching hard and deep...
...Holler was a gripping and fiery read...
...McCall's elaborate criminal history notwithstanding, he spent very little time behind bars: He did a total of eight days for shooting a man in the chest at point-blank range and served less than three years of a 12-year sentence for holding up a McDonald's...
...Those italics, astonishingly, are the author's...
...After that first train," he bragged, "we perfected the art of luring babes into those kinds of traps...
...She suspects what you want," he seethes...
...We ran many at Bimbo's crib because both his parents worked...
...They make him bitter...
...McCall is an unfiltered racist, he is given to self-pity, and he ought to be serving a life term in prison—but he knows how to tell a story...
...I suspect that babies secretly plot to make fun of grown-ups when we behave in childish ways...
...Now they feel perfectly justified in treating everyone else like intruders...
...McCall's lame essays offer no reasoned argument, no shrewd insight, no compelling new theory...
...He is "disgusted" by them—"pissed off" by their suspicions that "we might . . . break into their houses and rip off their TVs...
...Worse, it's boring...
...What McCall ends up with is not immediacy, but mere schoolboy crudeness: He was pitch-black, had big, bulging eyes, a little pea-size head, and hair that looked like mice titties...
...Repeatedly, he vilifies "paranoid" whites who fear young black males...
...Jesse Jackson confessed in 1993 that it pains him to have to walk down a dark street, hear footsteps, worry about being mugged—"then look around and see someone white and feel relieved...
...Some gang-sta rappers," he writes, "are . . . no better than the drug dealer, the pimp—or the wicked white man who earns his riches exploiting blacks...
...young girls...
...Nor can McCall criticize self-destructive behavior by blacks without adding a racist jab...
...Of course, that's not in keeping with the myth of this country, but it certainly reflects its practice—here and throughout the world...
...America, they shout pompously, love it, or leave it...
...Now McCall is back with What's Going On, a slim volume of personal essays—"my little truths," he calls them—about "some of the issues that divide people and keep us racially polarized...
...This veteran gang-rapist and armed robber, this recovering hoodlum who beat, shot, mugged, terrorized, stole from, or forced himself on who-knows-how-many victims—he has the effrontery to get angry when others grow nervous in the presence of black men they don't know...
...It is because of felons like him that such nervousness exists...
...What's Going On is suffused with it...
...If they were written with the verve and drive of his first book, they might be worth reading nevertheless...
...The bottom line [of John Wayne-style movies] was obvious...
...And while he can denounce the ugly messages violent rappers pump out, whites can't...
...And rape—lots of rapes...
...And here he is on the gentrifica-tion of Old Town in Alexandria, Virginia: Old Towns symbolize the American way: America takes what it wants...
...The one constant in McCall's writing is his pervasive anti-white racism...
...We ran a train at my house when my parents were away...
...And we set one up at Lep's place and even let his little brother get in on it...
...Fucking up white boys like that made us feel good inside...
...Needless to say, the fear some whites feel when they encounter unfamiliar black males is not wholly irrational...
...That wasn't yuppification going on in Alexandria, it was "the white takeover of black Old Town...
...He and his ilk are the reason that law-abiding black men so often encounter this humiliating distrust...
...Here is McCall on encountering a playful white toddler (and his anxious mother) in a fast-food restaurant: I have a theory about this sort of thing...
...There was no punishment for all the homes he broke into, for all the victims he mugged, for all the people he shot, for all the girls he raped...
...The conqueror got the pretty girl...
...In McCall's blinkered view, politicians don't simply pander to voters— they seek "to appease a childishly selfish white America...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 5
