Scott Turow - The Laws of our Fathers

'America is a nation conceived in original sin and that sin is slavery!'

'Oh, stop it,' I said. 'Stop trying to bend my mind with how bad the Negro people have had it. I get it, okay? And they aren't the only ones who have suffered.'

'You tell me who's had it worse?'

'Who? Oh, fuck you, Jack. Man, I wouldn't even be standing here -'

'Oh, that. That! Except the whole fucking white world got its little act together, man, and kicked Adolf Hitler's ass. Now, let's lookee here, over in the US of A, man: We got lynchings and rapings and burnings. We got KKKs and White Citizens Councils and Orval Faubus. We got Bull Conner lettin his hound dogs loose on black teenagers who just want to sit at a lunch counter, have a sandwich, man. And did all them European leaders say, "We got us another threat to civilization"? Don't tell me, man. I've already heard it a thousand times: that's different.'

'It is different. Even slavery isn't annihilation.'

From her corner, Lucy said it was all terrible and asked why it mattered which was worse. Neither of us was paying any attention.

'Our slavery never ended,' Hobie said. 'We will never be anything here but slaves or the children of slaves. Never! There is no forgetting.' Standing over the machine, he was virtually hyperventilating.

'You and I never remembered.'

'Bullshit!' he screamed.

'Hobie, you're tripping.'

Somehow this was the worst thing I had said yet. He took fierce hold of my shirt. As I was trying to break away, I ended up getting butted hard by his forehead. My lip bled freely. Lucy brought me a cloth and ice and I sat at the kitchen table, attending to myself. Hobie did not seem to notice. He came back in my direction, still screaming.

'This Is Not a Fucking Trip! This Is My Fucking Life!'

Afterwards, replaying the conversation for Sonny, what shocked me, as much as Hobie's anger, was the instinctive speed with which I had seized my parents' experience as my own. I'd been indignant that Hobie, of all people, would forget the solemn moral claims of my heritage.

Our relationship was never fully repaired. I knew Hobie better than to expect an apology, but he made no amends of any kind. His appearances at Doobie Hour became infrequent and Lucy often arrived without him. We simply let time pass. The night of my birthday, March 12, we tried it again. The four of us went out to a little Vietnamese restaurant Hobie had found in San Francisco. It was a hole in the wall on Van Ness, specializing in spring rolls and savory soups. Catholics, the owners had dolled up the little place for Mardi Gras with boughs of gilt leaves.

'Three great cuisines, man,' Hobie pronounced. 'Chinese. Indian. French. And only one place they've met. We're bombing the finest fucking cooks in the world.'

Lucy wore sparkles in her hair for the occasion and had brought sequined pinwheels for each of us. Sonny gave me a copy of Abbey Road. We all drank Chinese beer. Hobie said it was the best high he'd had since he'd given up cocaine. I – and especially Sonny – was pleased by that news.

'No lie, man,' Hobie said. 'I'm totally checked out of this white-is-right bag.'

Against the counsel of an inner voice, I asked what he meant.

'The American thing, man. White men have been destroying people of color around the globe since the sixteenth century, taking their countries, killing them, or making them slaves. The war in Vietnam and the war on the US plains, man – same damn thing. You think it's just coincidental that those grunts in Nam call NLF territory "Indian Country"? Think it's an accident we dropped the A-bomb on the yellow folks in Japan and not the whites in Germany? And now, man, if one planet ain't enough, now you-all gonna colonize the fucking moon.' These imperialist designs, Hobie said, were betrayed everywhere, not merely in the gross manifestations, as in Vietnam, but in the seemingly innocuous items of daily life. Hobie was now convinced that refined sugar was the product of a ruthless oligopoly, the subjugators of Cuba and Hawaii, who had purified their product in order to addict children, while appealing to the basic racist subtext of American life by turning a brown commodity white. The same was true of cocaine. 'White,' said Hobie. 'Purity, propriety, cleanliness, and stature. This country's got white-is-right on the brain. Look at all those dudes going to work every day in white shirts, washing their hands in Ivory soap. Think about it, man,' he demanded. 'Think about it.'

I studied him for quite some time, then told him he was mouthing Black Panther bullshit. He became incredibly provoked.

'They are powerful black men!' he shouted. 'Can't you dig? The Panthers are exactly what America has not wanted to see for four hundred years, man. They are African males, with their great big guns, not runnin, not hidin, sayin, Stick 'em up, motherfucker, I want what's mine.'

'You're fucked,' I said. 'You're out of your gourd.'

'Man,' Hobie told me, 'you can't even see me anymore. If I'm not just some cute Negro with a bunch of amusing things to say, you can't cope. Let's go,' he told Lucy and stalked out.

I sat there an instant, unhappy with myself. I briefly looked to Sonny and Lucy for consolation, but I finally followed him out. On the crowded street of low dun-colored buildings, Hobie stood on the walk, observing the streaming traffic mounting the hills of Van Ness. One of the aboriginal fern bars was down on the corner.

'If I've been talking down to what you believe, then I'm really sorry,' I told him. 'I've got my own thing right at the moment. But I get it. You know. I'm with you. I've always been with you.'

'You won't be there forever, man. Nobody white's gonna be there forever.'

'How's that?'

'This country's for you, man. It's for you.'

'It is, huh? That's why I have to run away from it?'

'Oh, you know. Time passes.'

I couldn't believe it. I swore at him.

'Okay,' he said. 'I'm just saying how it is. I know you're against things right now. Cause right now they're gonna draft your ass.'

'Right and you're a disinterested philosopher. You care about the oppression of people of color because you're a Negro – or black, or whatever word it is this week.'

'But here it is, man.' He pounded on his palm. 'Twenty years from now, you'll be rich and fat and white – and I'll still be a Negro, or whatever it is that week.'

'And I'll be a fucking Canadian.'

I understood all right. It was clear now. We had been through college, we had been through everything. We had been children, we had played intense boy-games, football on cold afternoons, wrestling where he always was pinning me, sitting on my throat or bloodying my nose. We'd done junior high school who-loves-who, showed each other our pubic hair when it started to grow in. In high school we'd made friends with Weird John Savio, who took us driving on the frontage road behind the highway in his mother's three-speed Fairlane, which he ran at no miles per hour until the engine smoked. In college, we stayed up all night at least twice a week, drawing anyone we liked into our discussions about

Occam's razor and various proofs for the existence of God, pondering the implications if it turned out that it was actually life on Earth that was really Hell. We secretly knew we were the instigators of Easton's legendary freshman-sophomore water fight. We'd done heavy doses of cannabis and Benzedrine hoping to bend our minds about what Einstein had meant when he postulated that matter equaled time. We had been through everything. But we were not going to get through this.

I turned into a nag, worrying at Sonny: Come with. In my anxiety, she glimmered like a treasured object. I needed love's comfort, a body to hold, her to believe in. If she would come, I could go. Sonny continued to toy with the idea. I could tell she wanted to think of herself as valiant and right-thinking. But she took a job waiting tables at Robson's, a ham-and-egger on Campus Boul, and proceeded with her Peace Corps application. As time grew short, I insisted on personalizing things. The real issue, I told her again and again, was her commitment to me. She'd sit in the living room with her eyes closed, trying to endure my stupidity.