makes me wanna holler: the autobiography of a conscienceless, black supremacist monster, Nathan McCall (review)

Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America (1994)

Re-posted by N.S.

J. EVER
3.0 out of 5 stars Well Written, But Self Indulgent
Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2020
Verified Purchase

McCall is a good writer and displays flashes of self awareness throughout the book. He also annoys the hell out of me on a regular basis. The self-awareness never quite extends far enough for him to realize that by the time he's 20, the world has much more of a right to be angry at him than vice versa.

Before he goes to prison, he's a prolific criminal. Let's start with "training" (gang rape). McCall recounts the first time he and his friends raped a 13-year-old virgin and claims that there was a voice in his head telling him to take her by the hand, lead her out of the house, walk her home, and say, “Try, as best you can, to forget this ever happened.” Is that really what his teenage self thought, or is this 30-something him engaging in revisionism? He took his turn raping her while she laid there covering her eyes. He says it made him feel ashamed and unclean (but not enough to stop participating in gang rapes in the future). But he and his hanging partners didn’t think of it as rape, see?

When he was 18, he got a girl pregnant (one of many) and decided that the solution was gang rape. Not kidding. He thought it would cast doubt on the paternity if several of his friends raped the young woman carrying his child. She caught on and got so scared that she jumped out of the car and severely injured herself (lost consciousness and was frothing at the mouth). Not only did he never take her to a hospital, he and his friend planned to murder her. The presence of a witness was the only thing that stopped them, which is the second time that dumb luck prevented him from murdering someone.

He complains about being followed in stores, but also describes how he and his friends would have someone distract store clerks while the rest of them stuffed their pockets with merchandise. Later, he ran such a successful scam on his girlfriend’s workplace that it went out of business.

He supposedly fired his sawed-off shotgun though a random white family’s picture window as they watched TV, after hooking up with the Black Panthers (whom he never mentions again) to retaliate for the death of a black man McCall freely admits might not have even been killed by the police (and even if he was, it was during a shootout between two gangs). He says he felt proud of having engaged in “guerilla warfare,” though this could more accurately be called terrorism. Conveniently, there is apparently no record of these coordinated attacks by black radicals on suburban homes. (It’s just a little too metaphorically perfect: Angry black radical literally shatters the very picture of white suburban tranquility.)

He commits a series of burglaries, some of which could have been home invasions because he’s not always sure if anyone is home. He stops being a burglar because he gets scared that someone may catch him and shoot him, not because he realizes that it’s disgusting and wrong to violate someone’s home and then watch his friend pull out his “meat” and piss all over everything.

He jumps over the counter to attack a fast food employee, which is the ultimate ghetto merit badge. How angry do you have a right to be about being stereotyped when, in your particular case, the stereotype fits to a T?

I don’t want to discount the psychological effects of racism and the rage and despair that it can engender. I can see where coming up the seventies, just a few years after the Civil Rights Movement took off, would lead a young black man to adopt some radical beliefs and not feel himself bound by much of a social contract.

[N.S.: The foregoing was the one really bad paragraph in this otherwise brilliant book review. Nathan McCall never suffered from racism; he was the racism that too many Whites suffered under.]

That said, he also had many advantages that he sometimes glosses over. He had a stable home with a loving mother, stepfather, and grandmother. They had a single family home in a decent neighborhood. (It wasn’t clear to me if Cavalier Manor was low-cost or free housing, but it was provided by a white philanthropist, though McCall wonders if this too was actually motivated by racism.) They don’t sound rich, but his stepfather has nice cars, and it never sounds like they’re hurting for food or other living expenses, even with five children. McCall does not have the excuse that he grew up in the projects and couldn’t avoid “the life.” He seeks out, initiates, and escalates criminal situations over and over again.

His family even has enough money (and generosity) to hire a good lawyer after Nathan shoots someone and escapes a murder charge (or even attempted murder) through dumb luck. The prevailing narrative is that the justice system comes down hard on black people, but he gets off with probation. McCall finds a way to say this was racist as well, due to them “not valuing black life.” Isn’t it slightly ironic [read: hypocritical] for him to denounce the justice system for not sufficiently valuing the life of the man *he* shot in the chest?

After this first serious brush with the law, does he buckle down and get his act together? No, he continues committing armed robberies and isn’t even that careful about it. He gets caught and is aggressively prosecuted this time, which he of course denounces as racist and due to his having robbed “a white business.” (Couldn’t be because he was already on probation for shooting someone.)

He goes to prison, reads a lot of books, does some soul-searching, and manages to get paroled the first time around. He’s absolutely livid that he has trouble finding a job due to the fact that not everyone considers his slate “squeaky clean” right after he gets out of prison. It’s not clear if they know about the shooting as well, but is it automatically racist for someone to hesitate to hire you in their store when they find out that you robbed...a store? He claims black business owners understand that “it’s not uncommon for a young brother to have a rap sheet, like being circumcised.” I thought that was an odd choice of comparison. Your foreskin has nothing to do with whether you’re more likely to rob or otherwise harm me. Later in the book, McCall denounces a white journalist for saying exactly the same thing: that black applicants may be more likely to have criminal records, hampering efforts to hire more of them.

[N.S.: In black sociology professor W.J. Wilson’s When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1996), it was the White Chicago businessmen who made pc excuses for so many unemployable, young black men, while the black businessmen talked straight.]

So, finally, he finishes college and starts a career as a reporter well before the age of thirty, which is kind of amazing, given the circumstances. Imagine if he hadn’t gotten arrested at all, if he’d just walked away from Plaz, if he’d avoided committing robberies and done without the nice clothes in his teen years. He could’ve started his career at the age of 22. The system, the “white mainstream,” actually held quite a few opportunities for him. Does he acknowledge this? Not really. He complains about white guys saying things like, “You must spend a lot of money on clothes,” (which he denounces as racist jealousy) or the fact that his boss was sometimes impatient with him. Ironically, it was his superficial focus on being cool and having nice clothes that was largely responsible for his “need” to commit robberies and burglaries and scams.

He seems to harbor a special hatred for other black people who don’t live up to his idea of blackness, which is synonymous with being “street” (how they walk and talk, what they read, and especially what kind of pants and shoes they wear). This “acting black” and “acting white” nonsense is among the most poisonous ideas around. One of the saddest scenes in the book is his high school graduation when he sees what the “no name lames” got in return ($50,000 scholarships, etc.) for focusing on school instead of Superfly and Scobie D. Yet, at age 30, he’s still passing judgment on other blacks for not being hood enough because their parents went to college, or because they didn’t go to a historically black college.

He complains vehemently about the responsibilities of fatherhood, which he actually avoids in several instances. He ignored several girls who told him they were pregnant. He feels nothing for his son Monroe and only agrees to a child with another women after being manipulated by an anti-abortion activist.

Anyway, I’m always up for hearing different perspectives, but I often noticed that everything that went wrong in his life was blamed on racism, whereas everything that went right was due to his own hard work (with occasional shoutouts to his parents and grandmother) rather than other people who helped and encouraged him and gave him opportunities despite his mistakes.

[N.S.: Not “mistakes”; heinous crimes and moral delinquency.]