Paul Beatty - Tuff

“I hate war movies. Especially ones with a reporter or a writer in it, always too good to shoot at the enemy until the very end, then they pick up a gun. Like if a writer has to kill, then war must really be horrible. And they never get killed. The writer never dies.”

“Nigger, you must hate your father. Fuck was Uncle Clifford doing to you, man?”

Both men watched the war reporter, David Janssen, smash a machine gun against the trunk of a tree. Winston giggled. “White people so fucking obvious.” He eased the bottle of vodka off the shelf and held it next to his leg. “Antoine, is there somewhere I can be alone in this place? I ain’t trying to hear John Wayne right now. I just want to smoke my get-high and chill, know what I’m saying? Carl still got them crazy videos?” Antoine handed Winston the key to his brother’s room upstairs. When Winston pinched the key’s blade, Antoine held tight onto the bow. Little Tuffy was growing up; he was just about at the age when cousins go from being trusted playmates to near-strangers seen only at funerals and on errands to the post office. Antoine let go of the key. “Thanks, cuz.” Tuffy headed for the stairs, keeping the bottle of vodka out of Antoine’s sight. “How Aunt Ruthie, by the way?”

Carl’s room, the cupola of the brownstone, was cramped with war memorabilia. Winston bypassed the swords, Nazi flags, Croix de Guerre and went straight to the army footlocker stuffed with videos. He rummaged through the pile, reading the labels, then tossing them aside: AC/DC Live at Budokan; Faces of Death; Lynyrd Skynyrd; The Maginot Line; GG Allin; All-Time Greatest Hockey Fights — The Probert Years; Fuckman #144 . “This one looks good,” Winston said, inserting a tape labeled Any Niggers Who Ain’t Paranoid Is Crazy — The History of Conspiracy into the VCR.

The video opened with a washed-out fourth-generation dub of the Minister of the Nation of Islam standing behind a podium, dabbing his glistening brow with a meticulously folded handkerchief and addressing an auditorium filled with true believers.

The history they teach us is incomplete! If you believe them, the black man wasn’t invented until the first day of slavery. The red man didn’t show up on the planet until Thanksgiving, the brown man until the Alamo, and the first time they set eyes on the yellow man he was dropping bombs on Pearl Harbor. You want to get somewhere in this world? Then you have to learn about them, the white man. I don’t know why black children do so badly in school, their version of history isn’t very difficult. Lesson One: The white man was the first to do this and that. Lesson Two: The white man is the best at such and such. If you’re lucky they tell you, then quiz you on the white man and the black man. And all you need to know is the white man did X, Y, and Z to and for the black man on such and such a date. But they’ll never teach what the black man has done independent of the white man. No multiple choice, true-or-false questions on the history of the black man that have nothing to do the white man, his wars, his foibles, his laws. And they definitely don’t … won’t teach you about the relationship between the white man, the black man and the sharks in the Pacific Ocean. What they don’t … what they won’t tell you is that sharks are in the Pacific Ocean because they followed the slave ships from Africa, eating the Africans as they were thrown overboard.

Settling back in a desk chair, Tuffy made a makeshift marijuana pipe by puncturing the base of a stray beer can with a bloodstained bayonet. He pushed the Minister’s slave-trade lesson from his mind. Fuck this nigger talkin’ ’bout? Critical thinker that Winston was, it wasn’t the historical implausibility of slave ships sailing the Pacific, when the middle passage was a transatlantic voyage, that caused him to dismiss the Minister’s claims. His ghetto cynicism was bathyal. A deep nigger-you-ain’t-said-shit doubt that looked below the ocean’s rolling surface. Come on now, sharks in the Pacific ’cause they was following slaves, that’s bullshit. Why the sharks still there then? What, they swimming in circles talking about “Gee, Harold, ain’t been no niggers around in a while — hell, they was good eating”?

Needing an ashtray, Winston turned a Nazi SS helmet on its crown. “I’m good to go now.” He covered the mouth of the can with his, lit the mound of weed in the dented chamber, and took a long pull. Through the exhaled smoke he watched the Minister’s left arm reach past the border of the screen and reel in a heavyset, middle-aged black woman. The tight embrace wedged the woman’s left side into the Minister’s underarm, creating the impression that the two were Siamese twins. The Minister introduced the woman as an embattled victim of the Philadelphia justice system, and the crowd received her with an empathetic warmth. His voice boomed throughout the hall. “Now you all know that this kind, beautiful black woman”—the handkerchief made another cameo—“a teacher of beautiful black children”—the woman nodded her head in agreement, thankful that someone cared enough to defend her honor—“a highly trained educator, did not hit that white woman like they say she did. How dare they accuse her of beating that devilish woman to a pulp?” The woman looked down and demurely covered her mouth with her hand, but she was unable to prevent a grifter’s grin from breaking out across her face. Instantly, everyone in the auditorium knew she had hit the anonymous white woman. Titters of laughter reached the podium. The smile on the Minister’s face broadened, and he hugged the woman even tighter. “And even if she did …”

Winston’s own cannabis-coarsened laughter drowned out the guffaws somersaulting out of the television speakers. Maybe I can learn something from this clown , he thought, “My niggers, right or wrong.”

The marijuana was potent, an indica strain. Winston blew smoke rings and watched them expand. There was a twinge in his neck; then suddenly he lost his sense of touch. The state of insensation lasted only for a few seconds, but he enjoyed the feeling of being unable to differentiate his body from the rest of his surroundings. Yo, I feel like I’m the air. No, no, the air is me. Niggers are breathing me. Hold up, I’m breathing myself. Take a deep breath, yo, you buggin’ the fuck out .

Winston karate-chopped the last few smoke rings still wafting in front of him and returned his concentration to the television. The Minister vanished under a blizzard of television static, and a well-dressed white man announced the existence of a secret society called the Illuminati. According to the nasal-voiced host, the Illuminati, all graduates of an institution known as the Invisible College, had surreptitiously ruddered the course of world history since 1500 B.C. The University of Sumeria — Ur Campus was the alma mater of its founders; current members received their training in a basement lecture hall at Yale. Pythagoras, Mohammed, Martin Luther, Isaac Newton, Voltaire, the Logical Positivists of Vienna, Umberto Eco, and every American president excepting Taft, Carter, and Reagan (pawns) were alumni of the Invisible College. The crucifixion was a fraternity stunt that received an unanticipated amount of publicity, resulting in the forced spiriting of Jesus to France and the publication of his Master’s thesis in creative writing, Sermon on the Mount , the text now known as the Bible. World War I was a practicum for honors students Mao Zedong, Lawrence of Arabia, and the mustard-gas manufacturers. Using the Nazis as patsies, World War II was nothing more than an elaborate ruse to set up a showdown between communism and capitalism. The Illuminati’s machinations were responsible for every late-twentieth-century conundrum, including the energy crisis of the 1970s, the chain letter, and Buster Douglas’s improbable knockout victory over Mike Tyson.