Makes Me Wanna Holler

McCall writes that “[f]or as long as [he] can remember, it seems that there was no aspect of [his] family’s reality that wasn’t affected by whites, right on down to the creation of the neighborhood [he] grew up in” (5).

McCall moved with his family to a section of Portsmouth, Virginia called Cavalier Manor in 1964, when he was 9 years old. McCall’s stepfather had been in the Navy; prior to Portsmouth, McCall lived in Key West, Morocco, and Norfolk. Cavalier Manor was a working-class neighborhood built in the early 1960’s by George T. McClean, either a white liberal do-gooder or a racist alarmed by the Civil Rights movement, depending on who was asked. Cavalier Manor became “one of the largest black neighborhoods in the Southeast,” and was an influential voting bloc and “a helluva gang force” (5). McCall recalls that “[i]t wasn’t the kind of neighborhood I associated with black people then. We’d always lived in drab apartment buildings that looked like public housing. All the black people we knew had lived that way” (6). Cavalier Manor, by contrast, was full of nice homes on trimmed lawns, with driveways, fences, and pine trees. Young McCall loved it.

McCall describes his first few years in Cavalier Manor as “a Huck Finn kind of existence” (7). McCall, his brothers, and his friends played outside for hours and the neighborhood was policed by “surrogate parents, people who would punish you like your mama and daddy if they caught you doing wrong” (8). The surrogate system dominated life in the community, including the schools. In his youth, McCall hated the surrogate system, but he later realized its value to the community:

It was only years later, when black communities as we knew them started falling apart, that I came to understand the system for the hidden blessings it contained: It had built-in mechanisms for reinforcing values and trying to prevent us from becoming the hellions some of us turned out to be (9).

McCall adds that “[d]espite our sense of well-being in Cavalier Manor, there were two things that reminded us of our shaky place in the world” (9). The first was the adjacent neighborhood, Academy Park, which was populated by poor whites who did not appreciate well-off blacks living next to them and often lashed out in physical violence. The second reminder was a big, ugly ditch prominently located in the main thoroughfare of Cavalier Manor, which bred snakes and rodents:

The city never completely closed it, despite vigorous campaigns by homeowners to get it covered. It was as if the city fathers purposely left it open to make a statement, to remind blacks that the community would be only so nice and that, no matter how uppity we got in Cavalier Manor, the white folks downtown still called the shots (10). 

McCall writes that “[t]he folks in [his] neighborhood were resolute about trying to protect [their] physical safety, but seemed confused when confronted with more subtle racial hazards, such as our fixation on color. I was a product of that confusion” (11). He recalls his “enchantment with whiteness,” at around 8 years old “gazing spellbound at whites on TV, drinking in the beauty of their ivory skin, which seemed purer, cleaner, than [his] own” (11).

McCall’s enchantment with whiteness was shared by most in Cavalier Manor. Children were instructed to act differently around white people and were chastised by their parents with phrases like “[s]top showing your color” and “[s]top acting like a nigger!” (12). He writes, “It seemed we were niggers by birthright and destined to spend our entire lives striving in vain to shed that rap. But white people could never be niggers, even when they acted like niggers with a capital N” (12).

McCall’s grandmother, Bampoose, “worked as a domestic for white folks, cleaning their homes, cooking their meals, and raising their children” (12). Bampoose worked for the Diamondsteins, an affluent Jewish family with two children about McCall’s age. Bampoose told McCall stories about the family and the children, and McCall became envious of them, deciding he wanted to be just like them. Bampoose brought McCall their used clothes and he wore them as if they were new, she showed him pictures of them and he styled himself exactly like them, but Bampoose also took advantage of her grandson’s envy and used his enchantment with their whiteness to manipulate his emotions.

When he turned 13, McCall began to work with his stepfather in his second job landscaping in Sterling Point, the wealthiest white neighborhood in Portsmouth. Working with his stepfather, McCall was confronted for the first time with the disrespectful treatment of black people by whites. Residents of the affluent neighborhood, both children and adults, treated the black people working for them as less than people, and when addressing even black adults, spoke down to them as if they were juveniles. Black persons, however, were expected to treat everyone in the affluent white community with respect:

At school, it was commonly understood that white folks considered grown black men to be boys. ‘Boy’ was a fighting word, one of the most detested, disrespectful things somebody could call someone else. More fights started over one person calling another ‘boy’ than over anything else (17).

In 1966, McCall was sent to Alford J. Mapp, a white school, for sixth grade. McCall was a good student and in recently-desegregated Virginia, the white schools were believed to be superior to the newly-erected schools in black neighborhoods. McCall’s experience was a disaster. The first words spoken to him were “Hey, nigger” from a white boy who had just tripped him in the hallway (18). McCall was the only African American in most classes, and those who weren’t affirmatively hostile to him were at best indifferent to his presence, teachers included. McCall was isolated, fearful, and lived every day in dread. He was harassed by other students and soon began to fight with white students, instigated by their racism. He was also envious of his siblings, who attended the new all-black high school in their neighborhood, who had friends, and who attended pep rallies and football games:

I envied them because I couldn’t match their stories with tales of my own about fun times at Mapp. I savored every minute of my weeknights at home and used weekends to gather the heart to face Mapp again. Monday mornings, I rose and dutifully caught the bus back to hell (20).

McCall convinced his parents to transfer him to the all-black school:

I couldn’t understand someone hating me simply for being black and alive. I wondered, Where did those white people learn to hate so deeply at such a young age? I didn’t know. But, over time, I learned to hate as blindly and viciously as any of them (21).

McCall writes that “[b]efore going to that white school, I’d never considered the beauty and solace of being around my own people. Nor had I realized the danger in being away from them” (22). W.E. Waters was the all-black school built in Cavalier Manor to discourage its black residents from going to white schools. McCall was shy and once again the new kid at Waters, so he spent his first year “on the sidelines, getting acclimated, checking out the social scene, and trying to avoid the critical eyes of the jokers,” particularly those that partook in “jonin’,” a reciprocal roasting that required wit and a thick skin—two qualities McCall did not yet possess (23). McCall learned how to get clean, get waves, and pimp his walk by observing the social scene around him.

McCall would come to realize that “there were […] two types of dudes at Waters: solitary lames like [him] and those who got into the slick in-crowd. The slickest among these guys were the older dudes, the thugs, who ran the school and hung in the streets” (27). McCall was captivated by the thugs, especially Scobie-D, or Scobe, a ninth grader who “was super-baad, meaning he took flak from no man, white or black” (28). McCall’s two choices were either to break into the social scene or be victimized by it. He made his first step in at a summertime birthday party he attended with Denise Wilson, his first girlfriend. McCall writes that attending was going to “be risky,” as “[d]ancing was a big thing at Waters, and everywhere else,” and if McCall embarrassed himself dancing in public, he’d be made known about it the entire next school year (29). He made his way with Denise into the middle of the crowded dance floor to obscure embarrassment, and after some awkward attempts “it was fun, and [he] was surprised to find that it felt so good” (31). McCall says that “[i]t made [him] realize that maybe a lot of the social situations that had intimidated [him] before might not be so bad after all” (31). 

McCall writes that:

By the time I reached the seventh grade, I’d learned that a dude’s life had no meaning unless he hung with someone […] Now, at age twelve, I was trying my damndest to hang loose with a group and get with the styles (33).

McCall began hanging with a group, including guys like Frog Dickie, Beamish, Bimbo, Tony, Shane, and Turkey Buzzard: “Through those guys, [he] discovered the strength and solace in camaraderie” (35). Hanging boosted his confidence, gave him a sense of belonging, and transformed school into a social arena. His group claimed a corner, gambled, and practiced fighting. The group partook in a fair amount of mischief, sneaking through yards to glimpse girls they knew through their windows, stealing bikes, and shoplifting, the last of which provided McCall’s first run-in with the law. After witnessing his parents’ shock, in regard to his behavior, when they retrieved him from the police station, McCall observed that he “had been changing right under their noses and they hadn’t known,” adding:

I could tell that my stealing confused my parents. That wasn’t the kind of example they had set for me. It wasn’t like I had to steal. We weren’t dirt-poor. My folks didn’t understand what I know now: My stealing had nothing to do with being hungry and poor. It was another hanging rite, a challenge to take something from somebody else and get away clean (38).

Still in his early teens, McCall was uninformed to matters of love and sex. Older boys from the neighborhood educated McCall and his group, but often incorrectly: “The old-heads said there was no place for love in a real man’s life” (42). Pursuing women was a macho game and the goal was to “‘get the pussy’ without giving love” (42). McCall writes that “[a]ccording to street wisdom, there were two types of females. There were women, such as your mother, sister, and teacher, and there were bitches and ‘hos, all females who didn’t fall into that first category” (42). Girls were deemed more attractive the lighter their skin, with white women being the most sought after. McCall didn’t receive instruction on these matters from his parents, so while very flawed, this advice from the neighborhood shaped his views on women, love, and sex.

At 13 years old, McCall succeeded in his first sexual conquest with a promiscuous dark-skinned girl named Sharon, as did several others from his group. McCall recollects, “I’m convinced to this day that she gave herself up so readily because her dark skin affected her self-esteem” (43). Shortly after, he and his group were introduced to their first train, which “was what happened when a bunch of guys got together and jammed the same girl” (44). Too afraid to participate, McCall just watched. Running a train was popular at the time; Scobe and his older group “trained anybody they could get their hands on,” and while they knew it could lead to legal trouble, no one thought of it as rape (44):

Most girls seemed to lose something vital inside after they’d been trained. Their self-esteem dropped and they didn’t care about themselves anymore. That happened to a girl named Shirley, who was once trained by Scobe and so many other guys that she was hospitalized. After that, I guess she figured nobody wanted her as a straight-up girl. So Shirley let guys run trains on her all the time (45).

McCall participated in his first train at 14 years old, on the first day of summer vacation. Vanessa, a 13-year-old new to the neighborhood, thought she went to Turkey Buzzard’s house to meet a crush, but when McCall got the phone call, the whole group had her captive. It was obvious to McCall that what the boys were about to do was wrong. Vanessa pleaded, but the boys pressured her, using the threat of violent rape to convince her that her best choice was to have sex with one of them to forego the more brutal consequences of resistance. McCall remembers the sad and fearful look of resignation that washed over her face as she acquiesced, and he felt sorry for her:

Something in me wanted to reach out and do what I knew was right—do what we all instinctively knew was right: Lean down, grab Vanessa’s hand, and apologize for our temporary lapse of sanity; tell her, ‘Try, as best as possible, to forget any of this ever happened.’ But I couldn’t do that. It was too late (47).

To the teenagers, the social pressures of doing this outweighed morality. McCall thought, “Vanessa got her stupid self into this. She gonna have to get herself out” (47). Of course, more than one boy did have sex with Vanessa; indeed, they all did, lining up quickly after each other so the shocked girl couldn’t resist. McCall recalls that he didn’t even enjoy the train that ruined this young girl’s life, that while they later boasted of their conquest, none of them enjoyed the act:

Even though it involved sex, it didn’t seem to be about sex at all. Like almost everything else we did, it was a macho thing. Using a member of one of the most vulnerable groups of human beings on the face of the earth—black females—it was another way for a guy to show the other fellas how cold and hard he was. It wasn’t until I became an adult that I figured out how utterly confused we were. I realized that we thought we loved sisters but that we actually hated them. We hated them because they were black and we were black and, on some level much deeper than we realized, we hated the hell out of ourselves (50).

McCall “built a rep as a lightweight player with a decent rap,” and eventually crossed paths again with his sixth-grade sweetheart, Denise (50). After some convincing, Denise agreed to let McCall take her virginity. Being teenagers, they used his friend’s house, but before they could get started, “about eight guys burst into the bedroom” (51). They were older, “hardened hoods” (51). McCall tried to fight them off, but they took Denise to another house and raped her. Several of the rapists were convicted and served short sentences; everyone in the neighborhood believed that McCall set Denise up on a train, and Denise’s parents instructed him not to contact her: “I was struck with the sense that I was deeply involved in some things that were over my head. At the same time, I couldn’t conceive of altering my course or turning back” (52). 

McCall’s first big fight was with his friend Shane, to save face over perceived disrespect. The two friends fought each other long and hard, each getting in good blows on the other, until McCall’s stepfather and mother broke it up. The fight won the mutual respect of each boy by the other: “He proved he had heart and that he could rumble” (55). McCall adds:

That happened a lot when two dudes locked horns. Each learned what the other could do with his hands, and both developed a mutual respect, especially if they’d nearly taken off each other’s heads. The whole emphasis in the streets on being able to rumble was rooted in respect (55).

Basketball was a big part of life in Cavalier Manor. The best games were on weekends behind the school. “Pure athletes” played basketball from sunup till sundown, while “pure hoods” spent all day on the sidelines talking trash, passing around cheap wine, rolling dice, and harassing “lames” (57). The games were fierce and fights often broke out. The best way to guarantee respect was to fight well. McCall and his group learned to shoot cuffs, jock-slap, cold-cock, double-bank, and sneak someone—all fighting techniques: “As I got older, though, fairness, honor, and all that other virtuous bullshit went right out the window. The object was to win and do serious damage” (59).

Older guys toughened up the young kids they liked by beating up on them. The older guys knew there would be serious beatings in their future and knew that if they couldn’t take a beating every now and then, they’d never survive. For McCall, this toughening up was performed by Horace Perry, who regularly came to McCall’s corner, tackled him to the ground, beat on him for a bit, then made him eat grass. McCall knew Horace had his best interests at heart:

Later, when I got bigger and older, there was no wrestling, and certainly no grass eating, when Horace Perry came onto our corner. We talked man to man. He gave up respect. He knew instinctively that school was out; the time for all that wrestling and carrying on had passed. That was a rite of passage that all the old thugs understood because they had once been young, too (60).

McCall says that he “knew [his] heart was hardening. In fact, I wanted it to harden so I wouldn’t get scared or feel weird inside when we did crazy things like that. I didn’t want anybody to see me equivocate” (62).