Chapter 1

He couldn’t remember the last time he smiled. Claude Carolina, fighting waves of anger, paid little attention to his family’s minister from the front row of the funeral parlor.

‘Once a black man, always a black man,’ thought Claude, ‘and it often depends on what type of black man one wants to be before he realizes that he is black no matter what he says, what he wears, how hard he tries to evade his own black status, or becomes what he fears to become, which is black. He may act differently at key points in his life, if only to look most unlike a black man, as though different from the rest of those other blacks he somehow rises to the status of someone most unlike a black man only to find there is no escaping it. He may even grow beyond his conception of what a present-day black ought to be. He may suddenly sprout gray hair, wear a fedora, perhaps a sports coat, with matching wool trousers, a bow tie choking his neck, gold cufflinks, and yet he will never escape the supreme status and birthright of being black in a land too ignorant to alter its perceptions of what a black man ought to be. He could marry, live in a luxury establishment, go swimming for an hour every afternoon, lift weights, buy a new wardrobe, from a shop that caters to the crème de la crème no less, and if one were to reduce this aristocrat with knowledge of the world, he would still be nothing more, and nothing less, than a black man no matter how high the status he attained or how lowly the reputation he deserved.’

Claude, a young black man himself, liked to think of it as a complex that consumed his father’s life, right from birth until his death. He called it ‘the nigger complex.’

As his father lay in a shiny new casket, the black corpse stiff and well- dressed, the favorite shoes his father showed off to the women in the neighborhood on hot Sunday mornings looking like new, Claude couldn’t help but feel the shadow of ‘the nigger complex’ encroaching upon him just like it did his father when he was his age.

Claude was lucky enough to have evaded it for most of his youth. Claude’s father, however, never got out from under it. The old man imposed such a rigorous discipline on his two sons that it seemed as if he always tried to escape his own flesh and blood, as though black was never good enough for his own skin. Claude, the younger of the two brothers, believed this too was a byproduct of the nigger complex—one part frustration at trying to overcome it, and two parts escapism when a black man realizes that he can’t. But the more he thought about the strange underpinnings of the complex, the faster its invisible hand lunged at his throat, and so Claude tried to distance himself from such thoughts about his father, especially since this was his funeral and the last time he’d ever get to see the man whose life had been more austere than a ruler rapped against his bare knuckles.

He sat in the front row flanking his mother, Phyllis. On his other side his older brother, Montgomery, sat hand-in-hand with his wife, Eliza. Together they made up the nucleus of the Carolina family. Claude wore an all-purpose, all-season suit he used for special occasions. A lint brush made it look like new. His tie hung below his belt and was too long for his short body. The monotony of an old Hammond organ hummed in his ears, and he came to the honest conclusion that he didn’t miss his father as badly as he should have. He tried to cry, but it was next to impossible, the heat of the parlor trapping him like dough in a deep fryer, the back of his neck sweaty and his body temperature rising within the blue worsted wool of his suit.

Behind him sat rows of other family members and acquaintances, also clad in either dark blue or black. Their stray coughs and whispers, their general restlessness, rose above the volume of the organ every so often.

He admired the skill of the people who dressed up his father. His father looked young and plastic in the casket. The parlor staff sucked twenty years off his age. They must have used hair dye on him to manage the gray and a host of other cosmetics to smooth away the wrinkles on his face. And suddenly his father’s lips twitched, and his eyes opened wide as he sat up perpendicular from where he lay and delivered a message from the other side, blinding light beaming from his eyes and mouth and members of the audience fainting at the sight of this old man returned from death and reborn into some supernatural being with heavenly powers. The thought of this happening, however, flashed through his mind for only a brief second, and even though he thought it inappropriate to think such things of his father, he understood that it was only his reaction to the extreme proximity of the corpse.

Claude had never been to a funeral before, and so from the nigger complex one minute to a supernatural being flying overhead the next, the wait for the funeral’s end became excruciating. The only connection afforded him between these strange and disparate thoughts involved the idea that a man could escape the nigger complex only if he could rise above the earth and harness a power greater than what was humanly possible.

This was a sad idea, because his father had worked so hard to live up to a set of irrational and unattainable standards while neglecting his true self. Those irrational standards became his true self, as though what was compassionate, forgiving, and light-hearted hid far beneath the cold exterior of a strict and exacting personality that taught his two sons duty and discipline above all else.

Claude’s father was never in the military, although he did act like a drill sergeant most of the time. Claude’s father was actually a school teacher who was unable to separate his family from the students in his classroom. He could be warm at times, but those times were few. Everything had to be perfect in the household—their beds made every morning, no rap or hip-hop music, just ancient jazz and gospel, and the morning chores had to be finished without fail before they left the house. Claude liked to think he won a battle over his father, a longstanding one, as the two were always arguing about his wardrobe, for instance, especially after he graduated from high school. As long as he lived under his father’s roof the rules had to be followed, the chores done, the music calm and refined, his clothes sober, and the television always off. Claude chalked it up to the complex again—always outperforming, never underachieving, the top button always buttoned, and his shoes always shined.

The Carolina family originated from down South where at one point there had been a rush among blacks to land jobs up North. Although segregated, without capital, without work, and without something humanly viable to compete, the Carolinas dumped the old South for New York. They got as far as New Jersey.

Claude figured that there had been an idea within his father’s mind that if one could somehow copy the white man in wardrobe and in thought, if somehow he could get along better, have something in common, and survive side by side with whites, they would become a wealthy and strong family.

And why wouldn’t his father want this? Whites had all the money and all the women, all the property and all the happiness, and even their hate groups to keep the same system powerful, up-to-date, and self-sustaining, separate but unequal. Out of this system, a system based on fear and hatred, did Claude’s father commit to the new and joyful territories of the industrial Northeast. The Carolina family left the hot dogwood and sumac-laden countryside of Georgia, it must have been, and trekked north to the liberal east coast, where they settled in New Jersey. Claude’s father found an integrated school district where he taught what he learned in the South, and Claude guessed that what his father learned was more along the lines of what the white men taught in their schools, and so his father had to replicate it for the unruly and liberated northern black youth. Blacks were just more refined down South, and up North Claude had the sprawling ghettos to contend with, where income levels in black neighborhoods remained well below the rate of inflation, and white neighborhoods at the heart of city centers remained fiercely white, wealthier, and closely protected by the State.

But there was a lot about his father he did admire besides all of their fighting over what to wear, books to read, and music he should or shouldn’t be listening to. How he made it to South Orange, for instance, on a teacher’s salary no less, still bewildered him. Maybe his father was stubborn and strict for good reason.

The interior of the funeral parlor filled up with even more heat, and some of the older well-wishers fanned themselves. Others plucked handkerchiefs from their breast pockets and wiped their slick foreheads. The white walls perspired all on their own, and beyond the windows, behind the well of the stage, cars beeped their horns in afternoon traffic, and children rushed after an ice cream truck wobbling down the avenue. Claude wanted to be on the other side of those windows chasing after the ice cream truck with the children, their playful voices heard within the parlor. But now the funeral director spoke, followed by his older brother, Montgomery, whose eulogy spoke more like a melodrama on how his father’s death was the greatest of all tragedies and how thousands of students benefited from his pedagogy and without this one man the whole community was lost. All Montgomery needed was the angels of the Apocalypse dancing over the corpse and blowing their trumpets until everyone in the audience went deaf. Claude was impressed with his brother’s choice of words though, and he knew Montgomery meant what he said, because tears rolled from his eyes at the grand finale.

Montgomery was a duplicate of his father, and Claude more like his mother, who also wiped away a few tears of her own. Claude understood that the entire family was proud of Montgomery and a little disappointed in him. Montgomery, a consummate buppie, had a nice three-bedroom place, also in South Orange, and a high-paying job as a trader for a Bergen County investment firm. He met his beautiful wife at Princeton, and it wasn’t like she spent his money on manicures and massages all day. Eliza held her own as a tax attorney for a Wall Street firm, and as a couple the both of them were unstoppable. They made a beautiful team, and everyone in the audience knew they would go far no matter what adversities were thrown their way. Montgomery’s future was made, and after hearing it over and over again, Claude wasn’t sure if he knew anything else about his brother but that fact. It had been set in stone that Montgomery would always succeed, and Claude just better do what his brother did—go to college, get a high-paying job, a fancy house, and a couple of bright, buppie kids to match.

To the right of the stage one of Claude’s aunts broke into song. The rest of the audience sang with her, all except for Claude who looked upon the scene with a silent disdain. How people missed this man, he couldn’t understand. He gave all of his attentions to Montgomery, his first-born. Luckily, Claude’s mother filled in for his father’s neglect, comforting him with words like:

‘You don’t have to be like Monty. You can just be yourself.’

Or, ‘he doesn’t say it, but your father does love you. He only wants the best for you.’

His mother’s consolation usually followed a heated argument between father and second-born. Invariably Claude’s grades at school disappointed his father even more than his penchant for the arts and music and fashion, and although these categories of interests seem reasonable as far as the average family is concerned, it was still unacceptable to his father who found that his second-born son liked the fast lane and the trends more than a rigorous discipline to well-worn principles. In fact, his father thought Claude’s interests led him away from achievement at school, and he was right to some extent. Trading CD’s, rapping on street corners, and wearing jeans that drooped below his buttocks didn’t mingle well with his grades, and in many ways these interests were inimical to any success as far as his homework was concerned. Claude barely graduated from high school, and just to spite his father he deferred a year from college if only to live at home, wander around the living room in his boxer shorts, and eat all of the leftover chicken and ice cream from the fridge. These were dangerous activities in the Carolina household. His father wanted him out of the house, but soon enough his father passed away at the height of his ire.

It’s equally difficult to say if Claude had any love for the man. Montgomery and Phyllis certainly did, but Claude didn’t really know his father apart from his discipline. As his aunt’s gospel tune hit a crescendo, Claude remembered how, at one time, he tried so very hard to please him. This was during his teenage years before he started copying what he saw on the television screen and making his style and how many women he could get his ultimate priority. No matter how thin his father sliced his allowance, Claude still managed to buy the latest CD or the newest pair of jeans. His father wanted him to get a job, at least something for the summer, but Claude hung around with the boys in nearby Newark, and he almost got into a lot of trouble doing so. He guessed that his father’s discipline, while unnerving, also kept him out of trouble with the riff-raff with whom he caroused.

Claude’s best friend at the time was a tall, lanky street kid named Clarence, and for a while the two were inseparable. But Clarence took a dangerous turn one way, while Claude kept his head above water and took the opposite route to safety. His father’s money, more than his discipline, when it trickled down to him, kept him honest. But he didn’t attribute his separation from Clarence to anything his father did. Claude always had a sense of what was right and what was wrong and knew already that his relationship with Clarence had to end or else he would wind up in jail or dead. When there’s no money, or at least an unhealthy lack of it, coupled by media dreams of early success and riches, a brother can sometimes get sucked into things he normally wouldn’t do had struggle, on some level, been glorified, or at least hard work rather than these quick and easy and imaginary routes to the top of the ladder without even trying very hard. In the city there is no such glorification of struggle or hard work. A nice ride is glorified. Gold around the neck is glorified. Money that buys women is glorified. A brother is always reminded of how high he has to go in the short life’s span that’s allowed. Claude understood why Clarence took the turn he did. Being born into poverty did it to him. Luckily Claude broke it off with Clarence. He knew money wasn’t everything, and arguably this was one of the essential values his father handed down to him—to do more with less, to clean off his plate at dinner, to know that ‘early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.’

After the gospel tune, the minister said a few more words. These words touched his mother deeply, stuff about having faith, living for the glory of

God, and how dying was just a part of the divine cycle that puts the good and the bad in their places. His mother broke down in tears, and Claude put his arm around her as she wept into his shoulder. How on earth his mother could miss this man went beyond him. She married a man as stiff as a board and as angry as a wildfire. It angered him to see his mother break down in this manner, and he once again eyed the corpse in its casket and wondered how much his mother would have to put up with at the expense of this one school teacher. There were scars even an expensive life insurance policy couldn’t heal.

Prior to his death, Mother and Father weren’t speaking to each other, a conflict they kept apart from their children and confined to their bedroom on the second floor of the house. Claude lived on the same floor, and there was always this inflamed silence between his parents. He heard very little talking, only the occasional snap that came from his father when he couldn’t steer Phyllis the way he wanted. As far as Claude was concerned, the last thing his father said to him before the ambulance arrived was to turn down his stereo.

The heart attack came in the middle of the night, and Claude was wide awake when it happened. They rushed him to the medical center in Newark where they pronounced him dead on arrival. His mother didn’t look too surprised then nor did she act out like the way she did now. Her expression at the medical center was as placid as a summer’s breeze after the doctor shared the news. Maybe she held it all inside, but something told Claude that the wounds between his parents went deep and that maybe Phyllis’ tears were ones of joy and relief and not bereavement. Maybe she cried because she no longer had to put up with her husband’s austerity or his high standards. Now that he was dead by powers greater than herself, she suddenly found her way out of the nigger complex, no longer needing to achieve or outperform if only to win the dignity and the respect of others and herself. Claude figured that the complex was as brutal on her as it was on his father. He likened it to a cage through which the imagination searches desperately for hope beyond that cage but never finds it no matter how hard it pushes. Of course, there is nothing wrong with wanting to better oneself, but it certainly becomes a complex when it becomes an obsession, when blackness becomes a color and an entire history to avoid at all costs. Claude sensed that his father never felt at home within the sea of blackness, and once he left the Georgian countryside, he rushed to conform, rushed to compete, instead of laying back and becoming what nature wanted him to become.

As a school teacher, he must have dealt with the complex on a daily basis as he inculcated his blunt ideas on competitiveness within his students. Claude imagined himself sitting in the front row of his classroom as his father lectures on some historical fact, not the history of the black man, but some outdated footnote on the history of Europe, and Claude raises his hand and says quite plainly ‘why are we studying European history when we should be studying African history?’ It was as though the white man played a bigger role in his father’s life than any black man, and the force of discrimination back then provoked and solidified his rapid adherence to thoughts and ideas that came naturally to whites, but not to blacks. That’s not to say blacks shouldn’t try to understand the fundamentals of European history, which includes both whites and blacks, nor did Claude think that blacks should never compete with whites, but he did believe that his father’s ways encouraged a special madness within his students, that driving determination that nestled its edge right on the heels of conformity to become better at the expense of losing the self.

Claude liked to think that being black came attached to a great and enduring freedom as well as a rich and popular social history. Why his father tried so hard to avoid his full immersion into black life he couldn’t say. It had everything to do with his being raised in the South where the ghosts of segregation and missed opportunity taught him to want things that lingered beyond the scope of his color. Equality for one thing, but Claude knew that things lingered way beyond that. Something put the fear of God into his father as a young man, a fear potent enough for him to move north and abandon the family he had down there.

Claude’s life wasn’t replete with aunts and uncles and cousins by the busload. It was a very strict membership of a few key family members, and the rest of them his father left down South, as though he were ashamed to have them visit the South Orange household, or better yet, the South Orange mansion.

The lawn and the expanse of their home sat between two white-owned properties, and his father took a great satisfaction to that, while his kids had a hard time with it. Hell, most of Montgomery’s friends while growing up were white. Claude’s father created this sort of environment for him, and Claude couldn’t stand it, really he couldn’t. To Claude’s best recollection his father functioned as a maniacal social engineer who believed that his eldest son, being the most responsible and all, needed to have white friends in order to counterbalance his black mind. His father encouraged these limited associations, as though it were in the best interests of society that his son assimilate and avoid his own culture. He made Monty his project. Claude, on the other hand, never had that problem. Even though he lived in South Orange, Clarence, his best friend, became his main companion, and it wasn’t a surprise that his father banned Clarence from the household.

“I don’t want your friend over here,” said his father during a routine argument.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“I don’t let people off the street coming into this house. You want to associate with him, that’s your own business. But this is my house, and he doesn’t set foot on this property, you hear?”

That was the extent of their conversation on the topic of Clarence. Claude would have followed Clarence to the ends of the earth, but sometimes for reasons beyond anyone’s control one has to separate from someone he cares about if only to meet him again at some later time, when they both have a better handle on themselves. He resented his father for saying this. Too much blackness didn’t rub off too well on his father, and the old man made sure to keep his family away from the roguish nigger element that haunted his mind. Claude felt the opposite. Call it a generation gap.

‘What’s so wrong with being black?’ he used to ask himself while in his bedroom at night, his parents in silence down the hall. And then he questioned it—’should anyone want to become black?’ From what he knew about the South and a black man’s fight for equality, the word ‘nigger’ became this unbelievable anathema, and yet he heard it everywhere, especially among the young blacks with whom he associated. The word was commonplace instead of a word that ought to have been banned. But words such as these are indestructible. To destroy a word would mean to destroy whole cultures, whole societies, whole histories. Such a word, he thought, was indestructible, even though he had tried to destroy it in order to please his father. At first it was used to define a race. Then it was used to disturb a race, until it was co-opted by that same race and used by said race as some sort of familiar salutation, until it was accepted law that no one shall use this term unless within one’s own race or risk the full penalty of using the term openly, which meant violence.

Claude understood the dangers of other people using this word. He also understood segregation, perhaps even more than his father did. He had one of those global bird’s eye views, and invariably he saw the United States splintering regardless of Monty’s constant uninterrupted associations with those of the lighter hue. Nevertheless, Claude didn’t care, because as he saw it, the Second Civil War wouldn’t take place in his lifetime anyway. The races had their separate cultures and separate identities, and no matter how many white friends Montgomery had, the United States, under what he considered to be white rule, wouldn’t collapse so easily, even under the pressures of racial strife.

As far as he saw it, the two races were separate and tenuously equal at the time of his father’s death, each with their own economies, each claiming their own pride, each headed towards their own evolutionary fate, and it didn’t matter that his friends, his ‘niggaz,’ were all black, because life didn’t really have a plan, and if there were some sort of initiative to enforce a plan it would inevitably fail, and if somehow there were a few special books that enforced or even predicted such a plan, then they were only conflicting reports of what would happen if two, distinct races followed two, distinct routes, not to mention the Chinese and the Japanese and the Koreans, and the Arabs and the Palestinians and the Jews—certainly they had a hand in all of this—and considering that they would follow their own distinct routes to some ridiculous idea of self-preservation, then it would mean the formation of many, different nation-states, each proud of its own heritage and history, each invested in its own particular culture and history, and each of them competing and fighting against one another while the government struggled to propagate a common identity. It led him to believe that his father must have seen the world falling apart, a warring society light years away. Instead Claude thought that he should live for the moment and not worry so much about the future.

No matter how hard Claude thought, it invariably led to some dystopic world where everyone suffers under the yoke of some great civil war, and he refused to entertain these fantastic thoughts any longer. His father’s genes were inside of him, and maybe for an instant he understood his father’s deepest fears. But they weren’t his fears or anyone else’s. He was able to make that distinction. He had no allegiances to anyone. He simply lived with his kind-hearted mother. Her comfort, as she wiped away tears with his handkerchief, became the issue of the moment, and yet he couldn’t pull away from what he thought. He looked at his mother in tears and then again thought deeply, as his father must have done when he was alive.

Perhaps this was the goal of humanity—either to compete until it ultimately destroyed itself or to get fat before death and leave the children to fight the same battles, yes. Now this made a lot of sense to Claude. No matter how many goods or how many riches one obtained it was never enough, now was it? Montgomery now owned his father’s battles, standing in the aisle with his perfect wife—they too would learn how to dominate and overtake and leave their cotton-picking culture in the past. If only they knew what Claude knew. He was always underestimated, and the reason why black men still stayed in America involved the insurmountable challenge of defying and then overcoming the very people who had one time defined their fate.

Claude felt his mother’s hand on his arm, startling him out of his thoughts. She cried and rubbed his arms, wanting him to feel the same sense of loss for the same man petrified in his casket. He left her arm on his arm, thinking that it would be most appropriate if he comforted his mother rather than give in to his fierce desire to think aimlessly. He listened to the echoes of his father’s pedagogy: ‘remain focused always.’ ‘Put in the hard work regardless of the result.’ ‘Always look presentable no matter how servile the task.’ At best, it was a life under the gun, under some overseer who would whip the Carolina boys into shape, because ultimately that’s what life did no matter how far he strayed from the straight and narrow. Claude figured that every man, woman, and child were under the same constraints—do the job, get paid, think smart, go back home, and tend to your family. This became his father’s equation, and any farcical deviation became a blunder within the slim, unconquerable paradigm of what a good life ought to be. Claude understood his father’s reasoning: the play-it-safe approach that led to the same frame of mind he had, the same sort of thoughts he had, the same beliefs, the same point of view, the same dire consequences if he should stray from the same type of life, anything to keep the same system perpetual, the same mindset constant, the same life evolving.

And suddenly money became this device which separated mankind. His father lived under this archaic system that still thrived despite his untimely death. And the single thought that eclipsed Claude’s mind at the exact moment when his mother released her hand from his arm was money. That’s what the world based its undying opinion on—that money was the object of desire, and treasure the everlasting option, even if they meant the slavery of others and the death of mankind.

Claude realized that his father not only chased the knowledge that whites must have handed down to him but also the money and the good life he kept for the family. His father never wanted to see his children poor and out of work like most of the black folk he saw down South. He had a tacit agreement with the powers that be. Half of the folk his father had seen down there were going nowhere, and it all boiled down to the same question—who had the money and who would be the most prepared to get it, and that meant cooperation with the white system. And with this thought the funeral ended.

The funeral staff closed the casket and wheeled it into a black hearse at the service entrance of the parlor. Claude walked with his mother to their Town Car in the parking lot. Claude drove, and Montgomery and Eliza followed close behind in their car. He turned on the headlights and remembered how, long ago, he had seen a long procession of cars on the road with their headlights on retreating to the same graveyard. And now a hearse was at the head of their procession. He never thought he’d be a part of one so soon. He followed the hearse on the road adjacent to a sprawling town park complete with a large, ornate fountain and a baseball diamond for the little league teams and men’s softball clubs, the lights glowing brightly upon the diamond, the ornate fountain defunct as usual.