Makes Me Wanna Holler

McCall started back at college in 1978. He was broke and Dr. Kaggwa, the professor who helped him get a scholarship, helped him get a $50-per-week job and a cafeteria meal ticket. Compared to the 35 cents per day he made in prison, $50 a week felt like a raise. McCall worked hard and wrote for the student newspaper. His professors taught him not just journalism, but also how to survive and thrive in the white man’s system once they graduated: “[T]here was one beef I had with Norfolk State and schools like it. They prepared us to endure a system everyone acknowledged was stacked against us” (239). McCall writes that to him, it was “loony that we were actually being taught ways to endure racism. I thought we should be learning how to attack that shit” (240). McCall argued that this “undermined the idea that there were other options left open to blacks,” such as starting their own newspapers (240).

While he was working one night, McCall found out Scobie-D had killed himself. Scobie had discovered he was terminally ill and vowed that if he couldn’t have his wife, nobody would. He took his small children to his neighbors, then returned home and shot both his wife and himself:

I’d already figured out that he didn’t really understand what manhood was all about, but when he killed his wife like she was a piece of property, it confirmed that he wasn’t half the man everybody thought he was (241). 

McCall discovered the author of a book that was instrumental to his self-improvement, Dr. Na’im Akbar, was teaching in Norfolk State’s psychology department. Dr. Akbar was an advocate of the American Muslim Mission and in his African Psychology class introduced McCall to a body of literature and black scholars previously unheard of by McCall. Dr. Akbar taught McCall of his ancestors’ belief that God is present in all things and that white people’s harmful actions towards others are caused by their view of themselves as separate and disconnected from other people: “[They] feel no obligation to treat them as human beings” (243).

Dismayed by his belief that while unaware, black Christian preachers were promoting white supremacy, and enticed by many of its beliefs, in 1979 McCall joined the American Muslim Mission. In response to arguments that black Muslims are separatists, McCall argues that every ethnic group maintains some of its own religious, educational, and business institutions, and that “no group of people in this country has been more separatist than white Americans” (246). McCall studied the Holy Qur’an, learned some Arabic, began praying five times a day, and got a part-time job with Rasool, the person at St. Brides who first introduced him to Islam, at a print shop. He married Yvette, though he didn’t love her, because it was required by the Muslim community for them to continue dating.

However, as McCall writes, “things fall apart” (248). After Dr. Akbar left to take a teaching position in Florida, “minor complaints [McCall] had about the Muslims seemed to magnify” (248). He felt they occupied their time with small things at the behest of large-scale economic projects that could benefit the community and bemoaned their priorities, such as a strict adherence to pork abstention while foregoing intellectual enrichment. Most importantly, he was “uncomfortable with the role of women in the Islamic faith” (249): “When I questioned some of the Muslims about such contradictions, they played a lot of the same head-games that Christians play: If you question things, they try to make you feel that you lack faith” (249). He left the faith. Shortly after, in 1981, he and Yvette divorced.

McCall “graduated from Norfolk State with honors in May 1981—less than three years after getting sprung from the joint” (252). White-owned newspapers were being called out for the lack of minority presence in their newsrooms, so they rushed to hire a few token black reporters to avoid public embarrassment. McCall felt like he was on an auction block. It was obvious the papers had a low opinion of the black journalists and were shamelessly searching for “a few ‘articulate’ blacks” (253). Most applicants didn’t care, but McCall did:

I wanted a shot at an establishment gig, but it was hard to feel proud about accepting a job from someone who clearly thought so little of you. I had too much pride to let some tweedy, pencil-head white man piss on me and call it rain (253).

McCall faced additional trouble in his job search because of his felony conviction. He went on several promising interviews, but was turned down every time when they learned of his conviction. Even his hometown paper, The Virginian Pilot-Ledger Star, where he’d interned for two years, refused him a job because of his conviction:

I couldn’t handle that. I’d served my time. I’d been punished for the crime and suffered, I thought, more than enough. I wondered, Why do I have to keep paying for it, and what benefit is there in telling interviewers the truth? I decided that from then on, I’d get my foot in the door first and prove myself. Then maybe, maybe, I’d tell them about my past (256). 

In 1981, after all his other job prospects fell through, McCall went back to his hometown paper and begged for a job. The bigwigs voted on it, and in a tough, close vote, they decided to hire McCall. In the mostly white newsroom, McCall constantly felt stares. Unsure if the stares were because he was black or if some colleagues knew of his past, he pretended not to notice. His parents and the older folks in Cavalier Manor were elated at his success. McCall was proud as well: “It was more than just a job. It was the start of a career” (258).

It was also the first job he’d had with civil white people. That’s not to say it wasn’t free of racial burdens:

The differences between whites and [McCall] seemed magnified and discomforting. It was serious culture shock. [He] sensed that many white reporters felt the same when they found themselves in comparable situations (259).

He also noticed that the personal lives of his white colleagues and those of the black folks he knew (including himself) were very different. McCall felt uneasy interacting socially with whites, fearful of what might be said if barriers were reduced. He decided to keep his white colleagues at arms-length for reasons of personal perseverance:

There were always two conversations floating in my head when I interacted with whites. There was what I thought and what I said. Practically everything I said was calculated to counter some stereotype whites hold about blacks (261).

He sensed that his colleagues were sincere in their desire to become friendly, but he “was convinced that the dumbest thing a black person could do was trust a white man” (262). 

McCall writes that “never, not in my wildest nightmares, did I imagine that going inside the system would make me an outsider, uneasy with the folks I knew best” (265). When McCall was assigned to the criminal courts, he had to hide his past, write about people he knew, and live in fear that he’d be outed by an old friend in shackles. Additionally, not everyone in Cavalier Manor appreciated the way he’d pulled himself up in life: “In their eyes, the newspapers and the police were all the same—all part of that big, amorphous, antagonizing white world called The Establishment—and now they viewed me as part of that” (268-69). McCall eventually asked for another assignment and it was granted.

McCall also observed how white citizens worked city hall, and that black citizens didn’t:

[Black citizens] seldom organized and went to City Hall, mainly because they doubted it would make a difference. As a result, they were always reacting after the fact, always protesting after some historic black school had been closed or some right infringed upon—all because they hadn’t been at City Hall when the deals went down (265).

He also noticed that a lot of the whites making decisions at City Hall “were actually dumb as hell” and made a lot of objectively poor decisions (265). 

McCall writes that “[o]ne of the toughest challenges I faced in trying to get my overall act together was coming to grips with fatherhood” (270). In 1982, McCall met J.L., his birth father. McCall’s brother, Billy, found him and made a point for he and his children to establish a relationship with him. Billy took McCall to meet him. J.L. had remarried and had two children, a daughter and a son. McCall recounts a day nineteen years prior, when they were supposed to reunite with their father. He contacted their mother and asked to take them shopping for back-to-school clothes. Their mother put McCall, Billy, and Dwight on a bus, and J.L. was supposed to pick them up from the stop, but he never showed and never reached out again.

J.L. affected Billy by turning him into the model father. He had the opposite effect on Dwight, who “seemed wholly unable to relate to the fatherhood trip” (273), while McCall landed somewhere in the middle: “I was aware of the major contradiction: I believed that I courageously confronted life, yet I shrank from fatherhood, one of life’s greatest challenges” (274).

McCall struggled to feel any fatherly bond with Monroe. It wasn’t until Monroe was 9 and developed a love for music that they formed any connection. It was too late, though, because shortly after, Liz remarried and moved to California, and took Monroe with her: “He didn’t want to go, and I didn’t want him to leave. Yet I knew I had no right or authority to raise objections to Liz, who had been far more responsible than I’d been in caring for him” (275).

After meeting with J.L. a few times, McCall realized that J.L. was still not making an effort to be a part of his life. Every time, the effort was made by McCall:

I decided then that I would never see J.L. again unless he initiated the visit. I’d wait and let him figure out that that was what he needed to do. Initiate. That was in 1982. I haven’t seen or spoken to him since that day (276). 

After divorcing Yvette, McCall began dating, needing “to meet someone who was both streetwise and professional, and who could understand [his] attempt to deal in three conflicting worlds—among whites, working-class blacks, and bourgeois Negroes” (277). Such a person was very difficult to find. Rita was locked in what Dr. Akbar called the baby stage, Marie was professional and a perfect companion for company outings, but was brainwashed by the white mainstream in which she existed. He learned that the dating scene for black professionals was very complex. The lack of available black men depressed black women and made them jump through hoops for a commitment to any quality man:

The math was simple: After they subtracted those brothers who were locked away, gay, strung out, unemployed, or plain fucked up in the head from trying to cope in white America, black women often found the pickings slimmer than slim (279).

McCall met Debbie, a secretary at City Hall. They began dating at the same time McCall was interviewing for jobs in other cities. He received a job offer from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and, when he returned home, found out Debbie was pregnant. McCall struggled with the situation for a long time. Debbie had told him she was on birth control and he felt like she might be manipulating him, but after consideration of his own father, J.L., he decided to bring Debbie and their unborn child to Atlanta. It wasn’t how he wanted to go to Atlanta; he wanted a fresh start, on his own, and now his past was coming with him. He also didn’t want to be another version of J.L. He knew he’d already missed his opportunity to be a father to Monroe. He didn’t want to do the same to his next child:

We pulled out of Portsmouth right after New Year’s Day, 1983. I had a new car—a Nissan Sentra—a new job, and having completed my time on probation the month before, a new freedom. All that, and yet I didn’t feel free. Riding down Interstate 85 toward Atlanta with a pregnant woman beside me, I sensed I was heading into a bondage far deeper than any I’d ever known (285). 

McCall “fell in love with Atlanta from the jump,” adding that “[i]f you believed the tales floating among African Americans, Atlanta was ‘the Black Mecca,’ a place of boundless prosperity where jobs for blacks fell from the sky like manna from heaven” (286). Atlanta “was the cradle of the civil rights movement” (287), and the mayor, most of the city council, the county commissioner, the fire chief, and the public-safety commissioner were all black. Atlanta had many black-owned businesses and civil rights icons could be seen everywhere. It also had, in its south side, more poor and suffering blacks than McCall had seen anywhere else.

Atlanta was also a city in the middle of the deep south “where whites still cling religiously to their racist past” (288). The Ku Klux Klan was very active and travelling outside the city limits “was like going back in time a hundred years” (289). As a reporter, McCall covered racist watermelon eating contests and what would, once the term was used, be deemed hate crimes. Once, while covering a story in a nearby rural town, the white sheriff said to him:

Some fellas called me on the phone taday and told me, ‘You better tell that niggah to get outta town before dark or he may not make it.’ Then he smiled, searching [McCall’s] face for a reaction. It was a giddy, evil smile, like he was a co-conspirator in it all (291).

McCall worked a lead and wrote a series of front-page stories that received a lot of attention. He was awarded the city police beat. He still didn’t like cops, but relaxed a bit as he got to know them and “began to understand why a lot of cops have bad attitudes. Day in and day out, they deal with the worst on the human spectrum, and they are despised by a good number of the people they serve” (293).

McCall writes that while “[w]ork was going well […] it was just the opposite at home with Debbie” (294). Part of him wanted to make the best of the situation, but another part was deeply unhappy and untrusting of her. He also didn’t get along with Debbie’s family and felt like she was using him to produce a copy of her family, with him being the father who provided financially, but was quiet regarding all other matters. Debbie’s family also didn’t approve of McCall’s “African shit,” as her mother called it (297). McCall laments:

It has always amazed me how some black people are so brainwashed that they’d fight to preserve a life and culture detrimental to their own mental health. Over three centuries ago, white folks took away our names and assigned us theirs, and we’ve continued that confusing practice ever since (197).

McCall’s second son was born on May 6, 1983, and Debbie insisted he be named Ian, a Scottish name. McCall gave his son his middle name: “Bakari, a Swahili name that means ‘of noble promise’” (297). 

McCall writes that “[i]n many ways, adapting to the white mainstream was a lot like learning to survive in prison” (299). McCall was intimidated when he began at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It was a larger paper than his previous job and the journalists were more experienced. Still, “learning the job was easy” (299). It was much more difficult to master the newsroom culture and the culture of his white colleagues. Newsrooms, especially in the deep south, put additional pressure on black men because whites didn’t feel blacks were qualified. This culture produced some black journalists who were “stone-cold assimilationists,” who surrendered completely to white domination and even denied the existence of racism (301). Black journalists also faced unwinnable conundrums: if they were aggressive, they were intimidating; if they were unaggressive, they were passive. The double standards made McCall second-guess his own instinctive judgment.

McCall’s paper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, was known throughout Atlanta as “one of the most racist newspapers in the country” (305). The only stories the paper ran about black folks “related to protests, sports, discrimination, poverty, and crime” (307). The paper’s white writers couldn’t conceive of black life consisting of anything more.

1983 was capped off for McCall with an invitation to speak at his high school’s ten-year reunion. While home for the event, he saw his Bampoose for the last time. She had kidney problems and died shortly after he returned to Atlanta. She did so much for him, and he felt he’d never paid her back. She seemed to live a life of endless toil, “working as a domestic for white folks so that she could take care of her children and her children’s children. She lived for sixty-eight years. Yet it seems she never really lived at all” (309).