An Awkward Disquisition on My Blackness

Craftsmanship has never been a strong suit of mine. I blame it on growing up left-handed and being told to write and engage in sports right-handed (and by extension, I am blaming Texas) as well as a motor skills deficiency that kept me out of Kindergarten for an extra year. I know, it's a tragic story that I use at bars to play the part of the wounded soul.

(I am also a hopelessly spoiled cracker with no experience in manual labor beyond bartending and a stint in the novice's version of Israeli army.)

Thus, I have a complex about my inability to build, construct, assemble, and walk down the street. When I moved into a new apartment and needed shelves, there was instant panic. A friend (with an extensive history in carpentry) reassured me with his offer to help, but this being the friend we've all named Boner (for reasons you can generally infer have a basis in the lexicon of human carpentry), my calm was quickly shattered when he "poked" (as he often does) an unbidden hole in my wall where a "stud" was supposed to be. I would later find out that he almost hit a water pipe.

This did two things: made me feel like less of an idiot and call a professional. And by professional, I mean the writer of the most coherent sounding ad on Craigslist.*

*This is commentary on the content of the ads found on Craigslist and not humanity (or handymen) as a whole.

The winner of my Craigslist sweepstakes came over during my half-day Friday to build the shelves. He was a large black man. Before I begin to wonder if I should feel racist for using those adjectives, I should add that he was also both "articulate" and "clean."

A brief sidenote: I think that they way that people portray Hillary Clinton (and Hillary Clinton alone) as "ambitious" is extremely sexist because the subtext is that she is ambitious for a woman like Obama was called articulate and clean...for a black man. Anyway...

Marlon (said handyman) was my savior (and who thought it would have been a carpenter after all was said and done), but I was nervous as I generally am around black people. Not because I feared being beaten up or robbed (which is blatant racism), but because I fear succumbing to that stereotype of appearing to be a racist (which in some circumlocutory way is also racist because it means that I am acting differently). This isn't me trying to "sympathize" with black people (also racist), I just continue to be hypersensitive and aware (especially from local New York media outlets) that the tension and mistrust is (believe it or not) still there and things are decidedly not "cool."

Of course when he requests some background music to lighten the mood while we (well... mostly he) work on the shelves, I have the instant panic again. I ask what he listens to and he says mostly what's on Hot 97 and some old school R&B. Having abandoned my days of radio, I am only vaguely aware of what the former might entail. Here I am pressed with the dilemma of the ages. Upon which musical stylings do I rely to avoid being racist or lame?

Fortunately, my iPod library does not fail me. I cautiously select the album What's Going On Marvin Gaye, which is inherently less racist than his Greatest Hits album because owning this album (a classic) infers some minimal sense of connoisseurship.

Also added to the mix is an anthology of Desmond Dekker, who is a reggae/ska vocalist I put into the mix with Nina Simone and Jeff Buckley, music that transcends genres because of the quality of the voices, not populist or hackneyed so much as just awesome music.

The boom of the first song resounds, Desmond Dekker's Israelites (my favorite Dekker song). Naturally, this has meaning.

The theme of Israelites, of exodus, and even of Zion, is a staple of reggae because (and I am reaching a bit beyond my consciousness) of how the history of the Israelites wandering for self-identity after being freed from Egyptian slavery is a connective narrative to blacks following their enslavement in Africa, the U.S., and essentially every colonial venue which blacks were forced to inhabit.

For a long time (sadly, up until fairly recently), the Jewish-Black alliance was something of a deeper bond as the U.S. trudged slowly through the Civil Rights Era. Some of Martin Luther King's major political aides and speechwriters were Jewish, as were the nominally white Freedom Riders. The most famous case of violence against Freedom Riders took in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three Freedom Riders, Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney - two Jews and one Black were killed.

Whether these things connect me to Marlon or my people to his people may be beside the point (and revisionist and shortsighted). That this romanticism pervades my way of thinking does not mean that they float his, we may never know each other's true prejudices (we meaning everyone) just as there was always the possibility that he didn't enjoy the music as much as he said he did (though Marlon did take a hearty solo during Mercy, Mercy Me). The important thing is that we (still meaning everyone) be decent to each other despite all that.

When the work was done, we fixed the hole that Boner made in my wall. He instructed me to tell Boner (and everyone else) that I built the shelves myself, and so I did, to everyone's eternal disbelief. It had a been a good time despite the heat and the work and I thought to invite Marlon to partake in my fast-approaching dinner plans with a friend, BUT the predetermined take-out spot was Dirty Bird and I didn't want to push my luck by offering fried chicken.