Mat Johnson: Loving Day

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The convention is underground, literally. It’s at the back of Suburban Station, the commuter hub where I spent much of my childhood waiting for the R8 to take me back to Germantown. The place is gray, but only because of the plaster dust of the cracked walls. Low ceilings, no windows, the smell of mold dried dead, a hint of train sulfur. I walk through the paltry crowd with my portfolio of samples, my box of paper and pens, and immediately I fall deeper into depression. Hanging on the walls, from the ceilings, on pillars, are superhero pictures, fantasy figures I know too much about. It’s a shameful place, this space, which reminds me that comic books are a shameful thing. Bright little pictures of tight bulging bodies. Visual masturbation for boys with manhood issues, and men with boyhood issues.

They are happy to see me. The guy running things, a skinny, red-bearded comic-store owner from the area, is named Travis, and he wears a badge that backs this up. It says TRAVIS! and he’s taken time to make the exclamation point big enough to beat down the letters.

“You’re here!” he says, recognizing me, and before I can wonder where I’ve met him before I see the event poster over his head and my face is one of the ones on it, which is a good sign because I’m a nobody and they didn’t have to do that. Travis is so happy. He smiles the width of his wire-framed glasses. He looks like he just received an official letter that says he is not a juvenilia-obsessed dork. The letter is wrong. He twinkles on his sandal-clad toes as he pulls out my paperwork and I find myself feeling for him as he guides me to my seat. We walk to a table with a sign over it that says, presumptuously, TALENT. Behind the table are a bunch of middle-aged guys, which is just to say they’re not young enough to be youthful but haven’t yet achieved the dignity of the elderly. They’re organized by company, and I recognize names of artists from the two big comic publishers, one of which is my own past employer. These are the heavy hitters, flown in from around the country to attract the crowd. I need to sit next to the heavy hitters. I need to sit next to them because when the punters show up there’s going to be a line stretching back through the building to get an illustration from them, and there won’t be enough time. I need to sit next to them because I have $1,103.86 in my bank account. My business strategy is: overflow. My greatest hope: lowered expectations. I see an empty seat by a guy who draws a Batman series — one of the bestselling titles this year. I’ve read his sales figures online: 150,000 copies sold a month, and that’s with illegal downloads gutting two thirds of sales. Best part yet, I did a show with him in Cardiff just three years ago; we went to a group dinner with our shared editor. I get excited now because, if he remembers me, he might even send a few of his extra punters my way, and I start speeding up my walk, my portfolio and box banging at my side. And then I feel the hand on my shoulder.

“Oh no, we already have a place set up for you over here. We’re organizing by theme this year. You’re in the ‘Urban’ section,” Travis tells me, and pulls me steadily to the corner of the convention room back by the exit. “Urban” is the nicest way to say “nigger.” I try to tell him that my book took place in the rural South, and he says, “That’s cool! You’ll be on the ‘Urban’ panel too; it’ll start in about an hour,” and sits me at a long table with three other black guys.

There’s a sign propped on the counter with my name and the cover of my book and my own face on it staring back at me. The folding chair is bent, slanted. I start to get angry. I have a race card in my mental pocket and I want to throw it down and scream “Blackjack!” but then I look at the other brothers looking at me, and they’re not complaining. And if I complain, it will seem like I just don’t want to sit next to them. And for a second I think, No, complain anyway. But the brothers are already set up, their art displayed and issues of their comic books stacked up for sale, so who am I?

“Who are you?” the man already sitting in the chair next to mine asks. He’s around my age, with more gut to show for it. There’s an eagle on his sweatshirt, its wings spread around his midriff as if it’s trying to fly off before his belly explodes. The guy’s tone isn’t rude, but it isn’t a casual entrée into small talk either. He really wants to know. He looks down at my seat as if some invisible, insubstantial Afro-entity had already laid claim to it, and really wants to know why I’m motioning to sit there? Why am I at the black table?

“I’m a local writer. Just back in town, you know, peddling my wares,” I tell him, and then babble on a bit more, eventually getting to my name and the last book I worked on. The words don’t really matter. What I’m really doing is letting my black voice come out, to compensate for my ambiguous appearance. Let the bass take over my tongue. Let the South of Mom’s ancestry inform the rhythm of my words in a way few white men could pull off. It’s conscious but not unnatural — I sometimes revert to this native tongue even when I have nothing to prove. Often when I’ve been drinking. I refer to my last graphic novel with the pronoun jawn . I finish what I’m saying with “Know what I’m saying?” He nods at me a little, slightly appeased, because he does know what I’m saying. What I’m saying is, I’m black too . What I’m saying is that he can relax around me, because I’m on his side. That he doesn’t have to worry I’m going to make some random racist statement that will stab him when he’s unguarded, or be offended when he makes some racist comment of his own. People aren’t social, they’re tribal. Race doesn’t exist, but tribes are fucking real. What am I saying? I’m on Team Blackie , And I can see in the slight relaxing that he’s willing to accept my self-definition, at least tentatively, pending further investigation.

I am a racial optical illusion. I am as visually duplicitous as the illustration of the young beauty that’s also the illustration of the old hag. Whoever sees the beauty will always see the beauty, even if the image of the hag can be pointed out to exist in the same etching. Whoever sees the hag will be equally resolute. The people who see me as white always will, and will think it’s madness that anyone else could come to any other conclusion, holding to this falsehood regardless of learning my true identity. The people who see me as black cannot imagine how a sane, intelligent person could be so blind not to understand this, despite my pale-skinned presence. The only influence I have over this perception, if any, is in the initial encounter. Here is my chance to be categorized as black, with an asterisk. The asterisk is my whole body.

I pull my book out of my bag, show it to him. It’s about fighting racism, or racists, or whatever. I didn’t write it, I wouldn’t have, but I should get some extra Negro points for drawing it. It says, I’m not just black, I’m conscious . The guy looks over at it, but his eyes narrow in on the publisher’s logo.

“So, you make a living selling your art to the big corporate machine, huh?” says brotherman.

“Well, you know, sometimes you got to fight from the inside,” I tell him, and keep pulling out my materials. The fanboys are starting to come in now. I can see them queuing at the white guys’ table across the room.

“Hey man, no judgment. If you got to suck the corporate teat, that’s just what you got to do. Ain’t no shame in that. That’s a good gig. Not my way, but, you know, I just think it’s important that we each do our thing.”

The big white guys down at the other end, they’ve got the cash-money Caucasian customers all queued up. The place has just opened and they already have a little crowd growing to see them do their stuff. They’re already making money. My new best friend and me, there’s nobody in front of us. There’s nobody threatening to come to our table either. As I watch the crowd build across the room, a white guy walks toward us, face buried in the latest Miracleman reprint. When he looks up and sees us staring at him, smells the desperation, he smiles sheepishly and then quickly walks away.