Chapter 3

For his first poem Claude Carolina rhymed about injustice and revolution. The hot white spotlight blazed over him like an indefatigable fire. From his position on the stage he couldn’t see his audience, only their sloping shadows like peaks and valleys against the backdrop of a pitch-black sky. He heard their movement, their restlessness, like soldiers in camouflage maneuvering in the darkness.

He commanded them. He knew when they would laugh, when they would clap, and when they would sigh. He memorized his older poems well, and he didn’t need to read lines from sheets of paper in front of him. He never merely read poetry. His poem was larger than that, as though it arrived alive from the depths of his mind, verbally inciting his future revolutionaries into action. It spawned from somewhere deep within him, the cauldron at his gut, and his mouth became a flame-thrower purifying their souls with aid of the microphone, its mesh wet with spittle and its pickup so sensitive as to dispatch his heavy breathing at the end of each stanza.

He gave a nod to the older revolutionaries—Malcolm, Martin, Che, Angela, and Amiri and then ranted on about affirmative action, delivering a startling polemic about how it must be upheld. He electrified the audience, and just when they thought they couldn’t be entertained any longer, he intensified his rhetoric and delivered an incendiary vituperation of the entertainment industry—of all things—giving tragic examples of how black actors, black musicians, black comedians were taken advantage of by white industry criminals dressed as sharks, paying no more than a thin dime for fifty-million dollar songs, fooling poor thespians into acting like clowns and delinquents, comedians who had ridiculed their own race in order to get laughs and approval.

The audience clapped at the end of every line, especially the young white students in the crowd who believed that Claude may have been the next black messiah, and if not the messiah then a certifiable lyrical genius with the potential for stardom. Either way, he made goose-bumps shoot along their porcelain arms, not to mention the applause he got from the brothers and sisters in the crowd who also thought of him in the same vein.

And to the people who charted his progress and followed him from slam to slam, Claude proved himself every time. He won a string of performances, and this meant a shot as national slam champion in Chicago come August. Sixty-three teams were scheduled to compete, and Claude jumped into the slam scene shortly after the National Championships in Minneapolis the year before. Many of those who showed up believed that Claude was the kid who would bring the title home, and regardless, Claude knew himself to be a contender no matter what his brother thought of him, no matter how much his mother wanted him to be like Monty, no matter how badly his late father had scathed him with his insults. Somehow he would make it, and adversity and the drive to prove his family and his old teachers wrong swelled into a new strain of ambition.

He ended a long and bitter attack on Hollywood with a couplet that left a lasting sting. And the crowd went wild, some of them standing on their feet and baying like hounds, their applause sustained longer than any of the other poets who spoke before him.

The fellows on his team were in awe of him when he let his emotional intellect loose upon the stage. Basically they were competitors just like him. Everyone wanted the praise, the applause, the high score that came with a successful poem. The slam merged art with the deepest competitive impulses of these poets. A zero-sum game when individual poets sparred and a winner- take-all spectacle when teams competed. The prize money at the end of most slams was a mere fifty bucks, but money never mattered more than praise, respect, esteem, recognition. People liked him more when he won, and he was a disappointment when they weren’t enraptured by something he recited. He could be as controversial as any other slam poet, but not so much as to offend. He combined controversial subjects with a deep, black ghetto voice, as though the warden just released him from Rahway, and this was what the audience came to hear. They craved black anger and an attitude as defiant as an innocent man slugging a cop. And on some nights Claude reluctantly gave them what they wanted—reluctant, because he didn’t want to be a reactionary for the rest of his life.

What about cooperation and harmony and real partnerships that didn’t blow a hole in the middle of the world? On some nights he wanted to lose, because his rhetoric became so outrageous as to miss the point of his own personal gentility and respect for others. He had developed some of that, by the way. But the real need to win outpaced such worthiness. People didn’t come to hear peace, love, and harmony. They came to relate to frustrations and injustices, struggles and conflicts, failed relationships and imperfect sex. Many in the audience relished in the fact that Claude was even more oppressed than they were and at the same time incensed over his oppression. No one came to hear Keats, Byron, or Shelley. Save that for the professors who forced their students to read them. The young audience traded a bed of roses for barbed wire, and it suited them just fine.

Claude imagined that if the evolution of the slam continued, which it did to a phenomenal degree, poetry would soon become blood-sport as opposed to the language of effeminate snobs. Sometimes he wrote poems about slamming, poems that he reserved for his private study of the slam dynamic, about the members of the audience who shook his hand afterwards and slapped him on the back as though he had just scored the winning three-point shot. He couldn’t stand the duality by which people responded to him, though. Within these clubs, people treated him like a prince, and yet the moment he stepped outside he couldn’t get a cab to take him to the train station. His fans didn’t want to follow him further into the real world. They returned to their real lives and became the automatons of survival they were used to being. It unnerved him in many respects—accepted in one place, thoroughly ignored and rejected in another.

Yet in the absence of knowing nothing other than spoken word, Claude came up with the same conclusion—that he must win no matter what. Winning mattered more than stubborn poetic conventions that were too outdated, too cryptic, and dare he say too boring to have an impact in the twenty-first century. It was the nature of the beast, and whether or not he continued to win wouldn’t have prevented poetry from entering the arena of brutish human needs and instincts anyway. But for his own permanence and survival, somehow he needed to win these slams night after night if only to emerge victorious.

When the thunderous applause of the audience died down, it was time for the judges to hold up their scorecards. Butterflies stirred in his stomach. He had been on a winning streak, and coming in second place was unheard of. And the slam didn’t end with his one poem. Another round would follow, and that’s when he would introduce the ‘nigger complex’ poem he had been working on. From the depths of the room a judge held up a ‘10.’ Another judge a ‘9.’ A third judge at the edge of the audience a ‘10,’ and finally the last judge, who held up a ‘3.’

A fucking three? Wait a minute. The audience gasped and then booed the judge who sat in the front row. Claude looked at the judge askance from his seat to the right of the stage, and he couldn’t believe what just took place. It was the lowest score any judge had ever given him, and he was sure that this wasn’t just any judge. He was a middle-aged white man from what he could tell, a bit too fat and a bit too drunk, taking part in something that was meant for the younger generation. He obviously didn’t have a life, obviously had something against him, what exactly he couldn’t imagine. Shouldn’t he have been at home with his wife and two-point-three kids, parking his car in the garage of his suburban home, watching old reruns on the television before he drank a glass of milk and stumbled up to bed? What right did this guy have coming into one of his poetry slams and giving him a score that ended hiswinning streak? What balls too, because Claude felt like bitch-slapping him, and most likely the angry, protesting audience would have followed suit in the collective mugging of this judge who had no right to disrespect him in that manner.

It was only after a few minutes of hearing the jeers of the crowd that Claude noticed his fists clenching. He would get this judge with his next poem. And the judge looked at Claude and smiled, like this whole process was some kind of joke, and he hated feeling deflated in front of him, as though this one white man had the power to derail his success. His score averaged a disappointing ‘8,’ the lowest score since his introduction to slam poetry. It took him several years to perfect the craft only to have this embarrassment of a score ruin his streak.

In fact, slam poets rarely got a score below six. So even if the poem was outrageously tasteless and bad, it still would have merited a higher score compared to the three this dumb cracker-judge held up. And this guy would be judging his poems all night long. Claude needed another lousy score like a hole in the head, so he decided to tailor his ‘nigger complex’ poem to suit the judge’s more refined tastes.

To the side of the stage he reviewed the lines of his next poem, and he found many words to eliminate. He dumbed down the poem to its essential premise that blacks today face the strange psychological dilemma of accommodating two races at once—the white character and the buried nigger-self. Perhaps the judge would better understand the poem if its controversial parts were omitted. Of course the crowd wouldn’t like it as much, but he could certainly average better if he pulled the plump judge to his good side. An eight lost him the slam anyway, so in the grand scheme of things it really didn’t matter how the next round went. Nonetheless he could get second place with a stronger second poem. He would have to improvise a lot and make the poem intellectually strong.

He cheered on his other teammates while they recited their work against another team from the Bronx. He paid attention to these poets while eyeing the renegade judge the entire time. Claude smiled and clapped with approval when one of their lines hit home. The poet from the Bronx delivered an average poem, equating his consciousness with the formation of the planets and the stars, asserting wildly that he was indestructible in spite of all the adversity he faced. The poet delivered powerful lines, but overall it wasn’t as good as the poem Claude had delivered, and he expected low scores from the judges. It came as a surprise when the judge who had given him a three earlier held up a ten on his scorecard for the very average poem. Claude couldn’t believe it.

And amazingly this one white judge gave every other poet tens when their poems didn’t even come close to his. The rest of the poetry in the first round couldn’t touch his, and yet all the poets finished the round with higher scores due to this one annoying judge.

He wondered if something he said had ticked the judge off. Sure, his poem teetered on the thin line of controversy, but he couldn’t find anything in his poem that merited a three. He had never seen or even heard of such a low score handed down at any poetry slam, ever. He may have been the first one in slam history to get such a score. Were his poems that offensive? Was he a terrible poet?

These questions entered his mind intermittently. And when the white corpulent judge handed out another ten for yet another mediocre poem by the opposing team, he admitted to himself that poetry meant different things to different people, and he had no idea how to satisfy this creature who had made a fool of him.

The judge looked like a wealthy, urbane, drunk intellectual. He looked somewhat important as one of the only older people in the audience. College students sat on the floor between the stage and his table, and the judge’s middle age stuck out like a personalized license plate. He could have been the Pied Piper leading the youth away or a college professor who read much better poetry and heard poets with much more talent deliver their work to more erudite audiences. Suddenly he felt a little inferior, because he never studied enough and couldn’t satisfy the judge’s scholarly tastes, as though the judge’s rigid standards influenced the other, younger minds in the room like a slow antibiotic.

Most of what Claude knew had shock value. He knew how to tease an audience, knew how to make them respond, and in many ways his methods took advantage of the audience’s immaturity and their ignorance of old school poetry. The judge represented old school poetry. He looked like he prided himself on reading that type of literature.

Claude reviewed the lines of his next poem like a mechanic checking a faulty engine, a self-diagnostic on his word choice, his rhymes, his language, his delivery. There was something about his poetry that was substandard, and he couldn’t find the problem in the short time between rounds. He wanted to be the best, and somewhere within the core of him he knew he had the capacity for greatness, no matter how small or remote the possibility. But maybe there were things about poetry he didn’t know, poets he never communicated with, and somehow the narrowness of his poetic knowledge dawned on him. Perhaps real ignorance was his Achilles’ heel in all of this.

No matter how many slams he won or how much applause he earned, there would always be some entity that looked down upon him and claimed that he didn’t know much about anything. And while this may have been far from the truth, the white judge may not have been so stupid, so white, or such a cracker. Maybe the judge appreciated things that moved beyond a mere slam in the middle of the night and knew for certain that greatness, no matter in what arena it festered, was only but a disease that afflicted the internal mind, only a fantasy lucky enough never to have come true. Claude, however, always wanted to be great at something, and he clawed at this idea of greatness on a daily basis—that somehow he was great even though reality told him differently. Ideas of greatness sat and collected energy, growing into a tumor so malignant as to project itself beyond the brain and spill into some distinct objective area, some niche such as the howling, jeering, and ruthlessly competitive poetry slam.

He wasn’t so angry with the judge anymore. Somebody had to clip his wings. Life wasn’t a sprint. It was indeed a long-distance run, and he relished in the thought that he had been cast down for good reason, as though this were the trek of every major artist—to be ridiculed if only to appeal later on to the segments of society that would one day treasure his work.

The spotlight didn’t seem so hot when he graced the stage a second time. The crowd braced itself for an encore of the previous round. He had appealed to the masses with his first poem, and he counted on his second poem, with parts of it omitted for the judge, to carry him into a victory so sweet as to make him invincible, even among the most discerning of crowds. They roared when the emcee called his name, and within an eye-blink he found himself under the all-too-familiar white light that blackened the audience beyond its sphere of influence. He again felt at home within this sphere, as though the spotlight took all of his fears and anxieties away. He began slowly, showing off his lyrical attributes, annunciating each word cleanly like a butcher who chops his meat down to the most valuable parts, and as he used this new approach, the audience remained as still as the darkness enshrouding them. And soon the temper of the poem got hotter, necessitating more volume and a little more vitriol. He recited the lines faster now, his voice deeper and blacker. The audience applauded this intensity and faster pace, the space getting hotter and his delivery honed, until, of course, he arrived at the parts of the poem that were the most controversial, and in a flash he decided not to recite these crucial parts in order to appease the judge.

He ended the poem with a dignified couplet. He could have done a lot more. He could have gotten the crowd to roar after every line or stand on their feet, but he tempered his lines. He fought for second place even though everyone in the room knew that he deserved first.

The crowd was a little disappointed. He made them think more than react, as that was his intention. The applause was mild, as they had never heard a poem so mellow come out of him before. He too shared in their disappointment. He considered the ‘nigger complex’ poem one of his best, and he thought a little less of himself after omitting the most controversial and near-offensive nuggets of speech that made him a favorite. The scores reflected his more academic approach.

The first judge held up an eight, the second judge a nine, and the third judge another nine—and the contest suddenly depended on this one white judge who smiled at him from his seat and held up—a two.

The audience booed louder than ever before. Someone even threw an empty paper cup at the judge. It became clear that the white judge had some sort of personal grudge against Claude, a vendetta against him for reasons he knew not. It scared him a little knowing that one white man was out to get him, an institutional form of lynching that not only lost him the slam but also frustrated him to the point of stepping off the stage and confronting the judge face-to-face. When he did so, the crowd cheered, because it had all the trappings of a Friday night fistfight. The judge didn’t seem too phased by it, and the emcee stopped Claude in his tracks and advised him not to start anything in the club.

It seemed that Claude didn’t intimidate the judge either. The man kept smiling and even laughing along with the irony of the spectacle, like he knew what he was doing and did it premeditatedly if only to stir things up. Why, though, Claude had no idea. Claude had never seen him before, and he wouldn’t have known anyone associated with him either, because he knew very few people, and all of them were black. He returned to his seat having lost the poetry slam that evening. As the other poets spoke, the white judge gave them all tens, which made the mystery all the more frustrating. The slam ended around one in the morning, and by that time much of the crowd had filtered out, leaving the hardcore fans to fight over the scraps of verse the poets put out there. The club awarded the fifty-dollar prize to another younger poet on his team for best individual performance, an honor that usually went to Claude.

The judge remained a fixture the entire time, but by the time the last round ended, Claude didn’t have the energy to confront him, even though the man deserved a pounding. Besides, poetry slams were not about fighting so much as they were about artistic expression, and if a judge wanted to make an example of him for no apparent reason whatsoever, then let him, because in all likelihood he wouldn’t get to judge next week or the week after. What he did was completely out of line, and the emcee who picked the judges every Friday night knew it. Claude stepped down from the stage and confronted the judge anyway.

“Yo, man, there was no need for that. I don’t know you, and my poetry isn’t that bad.”

The white man smiled as he had smiled all night—a grin that suggested a corruption beyond the doors of the club.

“I’m Preston Whitcomb,” he said, offering his hand. Claude refused to shake it.

“I don’t know where you get off giving me those scores. I don’t know you. My poems weren’t as bad as that. If you have a problem with me, I’d like to know what that problem is.”

“I don’t have a problem with you,” said Preston, “but I do have a problem with your lack of understanding of what poetry really is. I don’t have a problem with you personally. On the contrary, I think you’re one of the finest slam poets I’ve ever seen. You have a gift, a very fine gift that you’ll lose if you’re not careful.”

“You’ve seen me perform before?”

“I’ve seen you perform many times before, yes.”

“I still don’t get you, man. You cost me the slam tonight.”

“I did it to make a point. There’s a lot about poetry you don’t know, a lot about poetry that you still need to learn, and I can show you another world apart from these dingy clubs.”

“And what type of world is that?”

“I can make you rich doing what you love. I can make you a great poet, nationally known, a career in poetry.”

“Yeah, right,” laughed Claude.

“I’m not fooling around. I work for Breakthrough Books. You’ve heard of us, haven’t you?”

“No.”

“Well we publish some of the world’s greatest poets, and the way the industry’s going, we can even get you on television reciting your own work. We’re talking a major network here.”

“Television?”

“And who knows where it will lead—books, movies, you name it.”

“Since when did a poet ever make it to the big screen?”

“The industry is turning in that direction. You may be the first. Already spoken word television shows are in production. The question I have for you is: will you be the next great poet? The next Langston Hughes, the next Yusef Komunyakaa, the next Amiri Baraka—or will you settle for being a down- and-out illiterate slam poet without a pot to piss in, working gig to gig, not knowing where you’ll wind up?”

Claude disliked his tone. He certainly wasn’t illiterate or down-and-out. Although he hated living at home and being broke all the time, he still found great satisfaction competing at the slams. In the clubs and under the spotlight he was a hero, and that was no small feat for a young man who never went to college. But the guy sounded like an over-the-hill shoe salesman with one last shot at fitting a celebrity customer. Claude never trusted white people. Those days were gone, as though God’s crew loaded it in a truck and rolled it off to Canada or somewhere else where race wasn’t as big of a problem. Only in America did it become a problem for reasons unbeknownst to him, and some intrinsic part of him didn’t trust the man. Yet Claude wanted what the man had and wasn’t about to take the offer for granted. Money, privilege, and an education were things that never seemed to expire.

“Believe me,” said Preston, “most poets go down the hard way. I’ve seen it all too many times before.”

The other members of his slam team gathered near the stage and eavesdropped on their conversation. They looked on, shaking their heads, waiting for him to disentangle himself from the sales pitch.

“All I’m asking is that you give me a chance. Let me buy you a beer, and you can hear me out.”

“It’s getting late,” said Claude, also shaking his head. “I’m hanging out with my team.”

“Let them go,” said Preston. “You can go out with them anytime.”

Preston fished into his back pocket and handed him a bone-colored business card embossed with the Breakthrough Books logo:

Preston Whitcomb

Special Assistant to the Publisher.

Breakthrough Books sounded familiar enough, but Claude never heard of it before. The card looked genuine enough, but the guy may have been some kind of crook. One had to be careful with people like this. They use, they dispose, and then they recycle only when it’s convenient for them.

“Just one drink, okay? Your friends can catch you another time.”

The club had a small bar, so they didn’t have to travel far, just a few feet to where the walls narrowed near the entrance. Flyers, posters, and postcards of future events were tacked to the walls, each a loud advertisement for a band or a reading some place in the city. As the door to the club opened and closed, the flyers waved and fluttered in the wind tunnel the narrow hallway created, adding a bit of comfort from the sticky heat of the streets outside. The management kept the air conditioners low so as to bring out the anger in their poets, or so Claude guessed.

Preston ordered a beer, and Claude followed suit. Preston resembled a kid Claude once knew at South Orange High School. It was rare having a drink with a man on the opposite side of the tracks. He remembered the high school kid as a loner who was always picked on by the older kids. The kid didn’t have a friend in the world to protect him.

Sometimes Claude blew his own perception of struggle out of proportion. Whites didn’t have it good all the time either. He had to remind himself of this just to keep his own bitterness from creeping up his throat. The idea that anything is possible for a white man didn’t hold a candle to the tribulations of this high school kid who had nothing but bruises on his body in recognition of the outcast brand the entire student body burned into his hide. Everyone struggled, even whites. The crap on television was just a fabrication of the highest order, because it was crap, and he understood it to be as such: a pre- packaged whitewash that spawned generations of whitewashed viewers. Ironically most of what he knew about white people came from the television. Their lives looked easier. They didn’t struggle as much as he did. That’s what the television said. They were rich, got all the beautiful women, were smarter, their general psychology more widely accepted, magically explained, and strictly enforced. After all, they were the majority, and nothing would change that except for widespread Caucasian abortions. And the CIA’s widespread distribution of illegal drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes through the most populous of black neighborhoods only helped the majority, well, stay in the majority.

“So have you heard of me before?” asked Preston.

“No.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. You’ve had very little exposure to your contemporaries. It’s understandable. You don’t write poetry. You don’t show yourself on the page.”

“I write down all of my poetry.”

“That’s a good start. A poet should write something on paper every day, but does what you write have the same effect, say, as what you recite—as in a slam, for instance?”

“Why does that matter?”

“It matters a lot if you want your words more than your personality to be important to people. What you do now—that’s what an actor does or a performer. Poets aren’t exactly performers, now are they?”

“It’s the evolution of poetry,” said Claude, “stemming back from the Beat Generation to present day. And as far as oral poetry is concerned, that’s been around since the Ancient Greeks, and believe me, they performed with the same energy I perform my pieces.”

“There’s a difference, though, between the two forms of poetry,” said Preston before taking a long swig of his beer, the tacked-up flyers flapping in the wind. “You’ve got to decide which side you’re on.”

“I didn’t know there were any sides.”

“Let’s just say that poetry, to qualify as poetry in my book, or in our company’s book anyway, is the type of poetry that holds up on the page, the kind of poetry people read and not just listen to like they would a television set or a radio.”

“But I thought you wanted me for television.”

“I do—let me finish. What audiences want to see, or rather what they want to know is that the poet performing the work has the credentials to be performing that work. In other words, the poet has to be respected enough by his community of poets to be performing that kind of work with that type of energy, as you put it. We can’t just put a street poet up there, now can we?”

“They do it here.”

Preston rolled his eyes.

“This is not national television, Claude. The poets who perform here will never make it, and I don’t mean to offend anybody here, but these poets are street poets. They’re nowhere near to being scholarly enough for a national television show.”

“What about me? I’m a street poet.”

“Let me explain this another way. Do you like basketball, Claude?”

He could have said ‘no,’ because he never liked basketball much. He never followed it, and although there were plenty of brothers who watched game after game and played it in the broken playgrounds of Newark for bragging rights, he had to admit that he never liked the sport very much. Once again the cracker tried to pigeonhole him, as though basketball was the only way a white man could connect with a street nigger such as himself. They never see the inside of a man, just the chocolate on the outside—him and eighty percent of the population. An uphill battle indeed. Claude just nodded along.

“Notice in basketball how you have the street players who are all flashy, and they talk shit a lot, and their game on the whole looks really good, but they’re really mediocre. Compare them to those players who went through the training only college could provide, who decided to fuse what they learned on the street and what they learned in the classroom. You see, the street players have knowledge that no one can duplicate, the knowledge of street basketball. What they have to learn after that, what they have to have is the mindset and the conditioning to catapult them right into the big leagues. As it turns out, the guys who only know the street, well, they wind up at a dead end. Those guys who went to college and played college-level ball, well, they go on to do great things.”