Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

Soon the Bacchanalian MiseryFests became gala events; colored folks from all over Los Angeles crashed Hillside to take part in the spectacle. To ensure that the Friday nights didn’t turn into a trendy happening for whities bold enough to spelunk into the depths of the ghetto, Psycho Loco stationed armed guards at the gate to keep out the blue-eyed soulsters. Questioning anyone who looked to be of Caucasian descent, the sentries showed those of dubious ancestry a photograph of a radial-tire-colored black man, then asked, “What’s darker than this man’s face?” Anyone who didn’t answer “His butt” or “His nipples” didn’t get in.

The networks caught wind of the MiseryFest’s popularity and offered a bundle of money for the rights to broadcast weekly installments. We accepted the best offer and divvied it up among all the households in Hillside, and the television station agreed to the following conditions.

• Build the Reynier Park Amphitheater and pay for its maintenance.

• Build huge video screens throughout the neighborhood.

• Use only colored camerapersons and support staff.

• All broadcasts must be live and unedited.

• Stay the fuck out of the way.

The next scheduled broadcast was on the two-year anniversary of Scoby’s death. There were widespread rumors that I would use the national forum to immolate myself Buddhist-monk style and skewer my daughter Naomi on a barbecue spit rotating over my pyre. Niggers jammed the theater and filled the streets of Hillside to pay their last respects. Television expected the rest of the bloodthirsty world to tune in for the first live broadcast of a suicide.

The fest opened with an hour of silence followed by a parade of local residents declaring their undying love for Nicholas, most of the tearful reminiscences starting with “I remember when that nigger wasn’t but about yea big…” But it was my show — I was his best friend, obliged to use the belles-lettres to fortify Scoby’s status as a sainted martyr.

I opened with a powerful two-hour raga-ode to Nicholas entitled “Barrio Bangladesh,” throughout which the audience rocked in their seats, wailing with my rhythmic recitation. When I finished, I looked into twenty thousand faces in stone silence. The audience was anesthetized, unable to move. A review of the night’s festivities stated that the poem brought every listener in the house to “the zenith of comprehension. Not since the New Testament has the death of morality been so eloquently eulogized.” I announced my next poem, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Crib Death.” After I read the last few stanzas —

Remorse lies

not in the consciousness

of a murderous parent

who rocks a child born into slavery

to divine sleep

with jugular lullaby

sung by sharp blade

and suffocating love

applied with pillow and pressure

Remorse lies

in the slave owner’s anguished cries

upon discovering

his property permanently damaged;

a bloody hieroglyph carved into flesh

the smiling lips swollen and blue with asphyxiation

after he calculates his losses

forecasts the impact on this year’s crop

he will notice the textual eyes of murder/suicide

read “caveat emptor”

let the buyer beware

— Hillside erupted. Niggers lost their fucking minds. When the huzzas reached their climax, I prepared for my encore, a small sacrifice and show of appreciation to Nick Scoby, to any niggers who cared.

I launched into a solemn monologue explaining how through painstaking research I’d unearthed proof that President Truman’s threat to drop a third atomic bomb on Japan was not, as he later claimed, merely an idle boast to intimidate the Land of the Rising Sun into a speedy surrender. Elongated cries of disbelief rang out from the bleachers: “Noooo.” “Yessssss,” I replied, holding up photos of grinning Manhattan Project scientists casually leaning and squatting around three bombs, Fat Man, Little Boy, and the newly discovered Svelte Guy, each with cute slogans like “Flatten Japan” and “Sorry for stepping on your toe, Joe” chalked on the metallic hull. “You may pass these photographs around. I have the negatives.”

As the photos circulated through the audience, I produced a white handkerchief and a shiny carving knife from my back pocket and placed them on the rostrum. Carefully smoothing the hanky out toward the corners, I issued a challenge to the United States government. “When I was a child, my dad — before he left us, the fuck — whenever I did something wrong, he used to say, ‘I brought you into this world and I’ll take you out.’ Well, Big Daddy, Uncle Sam, oh Great White Father, you brought me here, so I’m asking you to take me out. Finish the job. Pass the ultimate death penalty. Authorize the carrying out of directive 1609, ‘Kill All Niggers.’ Don’t let Svelte Guy lie dormant in the basement of the Smithsonian. Drop the bomb. Drop the bomb on me! Drop the bomb on Hillside!”

I placed the pinky of my right hand on the handkerchief. With my left hand I picked up the knife and sterilized it with a couple of passes over my pants leg. Before someone could ask, “What the hell are you doing?” I brought the knife down over my finger and hacked it off with one strike.

I’d prepared myself for the pain, but I wasn’t ready for the amplified sound that pounded out of the monitors. One hundred thousand crunching watts of stainless steel cleaving through bone followed by the solid kachunk of the knife into the mahogany lectern, followed by my gasp, the audience’s gasp, and my deep inhalation in shock. The first thing I heard was the familiar voice of Coach Shimimoto yelling from the front row, “Suck it up, Kaufman!”

I reeled for a moment, then meticulously wrapped the speckled red-and-white handkerchief around the severed finger, exactly as I’d seen Robert Mitchum do in some American yakuza movie. Staring at the space where my finger used to be, I held my hand high above my head. The blood ran down my arm, and what didn’t pool in my armpit puddled next to my sneakers. I lowered my head, then exited stage left, the soles of my blood-soaked shoes sticking to the floorboards as if I were walking in yesterday’s spilled soda.

* * *

That night cemented my status as savior of the blacks. The distraught minions interpreted my masochistic act as sincerity, the media as lunacy. The more I tried to deny my ascendency, the more beloved I became. Spiteful black folk and likeminded others from across the nation continue to immigrate to Hillside, seeking mass martyrdom. They refurbish the abandoned houses and erect tent cities on the vacant lots, transforming the neighborhood into a hospice.

The government’s reluctant confirmation of the existence of Svelte Guy spurred a massive letter-writing campaign asking the government not to waste the uranium and to test the antiquated A-bomb by dropping it on “those ungrateful passive-aggressive L.A. niggers.” Ignoring the Japanese claim of dibs to the bomb as a keepsake of war, Congress passed a motion to quell our insurrection by issuing an ultimatum: rejoin the rest of America or celebrate Kwanzaa in hell. The response was to paint white concentric circles on the roofs of the neighborhood, so that from the air Hillside looks like one big target, with La Cienega Motor Lodge and Laundromat as the fifty-point bull’s-eye.

IT’S BEEN A LOVELY five hundred years, but it’s time to go. We’re abandoning this sinking ship America, lightening its load by tossing our histories overboard, jettisoning the present, and drydocking our future. Black America has relinquished its needs in a world where expectations are illusion, has refused to develop ideals and mores in a society that applies principles without principle.