Black folk could fly, p.10
Black Folk Could Fly, page 10
The truth is, I would have made a dreadful scientist. I was a disaster in a laboratory, a bit too dreamy. My academic advisor told me this. I took more and more English classes; Gaussian matrices annoyed the hell out of me; and thermodynamics, as fascinating as they are, made less sense than Buddhist koans. By the summer of my senior year I was hell-bent in the pursuit of language; differential calculus and I said goodbye.
To this day, I feel that I’ve failed in some way by not pursuing my original goal. To be sure, we all have such naggings in the back of our heads, though I am happy with my choices. But the relevant thing here is that, after 1985, I not only turned my back on science but I also turned my back on the computer. I would come to tamper with computers and programs in the most innocuous way after the personal computer revolution, but only with games and word processing.
Ten years later, however, back at Chapel Hill, the computer and I became reacquainted.
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My granddaddy is one of my heroes.
He was born on his father’s farm in Chinquapin, and his mother was the local schoolteacher. He worked at various jobs as a young man, including shipbuilding down in Wilmington, but in 1942, he and another man bought the equipment to open a dry cleaner. When he began, he would walk to people’s houses in the community of Wallace, and ask if they needed anything cleaned, and he would tote their clothing to and fro. By and by, he bought his partner out, his business grew, and he was able to build a two-story red-brick house, with a lovely terrace in the back, and next door was his cleaners and my grandmother’s seamstress shop.
He sent his youngest son to college and paid for it himself. His older son joined the air force. By the time I was in high school, my grandfather’s routes went into three counties, and for a time, he employed a number of delivery trucks. My grandfather also sold clothing and bought houses that he would fix up and rent out, and for a time even dealt in scrap metal.
My uncle, George Edward, suffered from epilepsy and other ailments, and came to live with my grandfather and grandmother after he had been discharged from the military and needed to be looked after. I remember this period as a particularly troubling time, and I helped my grandfather on his route, down to Maple Hill and Beulaville. I would sometimes drive his truck through those narrow highways and secondary roads. What struck me and stuck with me long after was first of all how hard he worked, and secondly, how many people he knew and how much he was trusted and respected. Even at that age, it never occurred to me how difficult what he had accomplished must have been for a poor boy from Chinquapin, North Carolina. Indeed, all the products of his labor I essentially took for granted; to me, my head full of stuff and nonsense, my grandfather was a wonderful man, but nothing about what he did made him remarkable. He was simply a small businessman.
My grandmother died when I was in college, and for a time, my grandfather was understandably depressed. They had been married for almost fifty years. I still miss my grandmother. In the mid-1980s my family had a rash of trouble. My mother’s house, the ancestral family home, burned to the ground; my mother’s son-in-law, who had become very like a father to me, came down with a mysterious ailment that almost caused him to die; and my grandfather suffered a horrible burn accident.
I then lived in New York, and I flew down straightaway. He was in the Burn Center at Chapel Hill’s Memorial Hospital. Initially, the doctors said his chances were grave; he was not expected to live, he had been burned on 75 percent of his body, much of it third-degree burns. We would make the trip from Chinquapin to Chapel Hill each day, and to watch him in such pain was enough to make us despair. At one point, he told his sister that he wished he could just die.
My grandfather remained in the hospital for three months. He was, at the time, seventy-four. Each week, his prognosis got better and better, and, much to the doctors’ amazement, he recovered enough to go home. He was not 100 percent, as he would say, but he was alive. The doctors suggested that, though with therapy they could help him regain his full walking capacity and the use of his limbs, he would never regain the full quality of his life. He went through months of painful therapeutic exercise and changes of dressings.
Within two years, not only had my grandfather recovered almost completely, not only had he regained his ability to walk unassisted by a cane, not only had he gone back to his six-day-a-week, fourteen-hour-a-day schedule, and gone back to tending his massive garden of peas and collards and mustard greens and okra and sweet potatoes, but he also, at seventy-eight, married a woman ten years his junior.
John educated himself so fast that within a few months after he bought his modem, he was on track with the other MOD [Masters of Deception] boys. For one thing, John figured out that some rules are the same, whether you’re on the street or in cyberspace. If you want to get ahead, no one is going to just let you. You have to take what you want and get there yourself. He played a little game sometimes. He called it Let a Hacker Do the Work. Like the time he called a hacker named Signal Interrupt in Florida, and sweet-talked the kid out of all kinds of information, just by claiming to be a member of the Legion of Doom.
Another way cyberspace was like the street was that it helps to have friends.
—Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner, Masters of Deception
John Lee was essentially a poor Black boy from Brooklyn, who, with a $299.00 Commodore 64 computer, became one of the most brilliant and most notorious hackers in the country. He had been a member in good standing of a group of boys who called themselves the Masters of Deception, a high-brainpowered bunch of bad boys who were breaking into private computer files, rewiring phone lines, stealing a look at the credit histories of the rich and famous, and other crimes that had the FBI nervous and frustrated, and AT&T hopping mad.
Interestingly enough, the Masters of Deception had been formed in response to another group, the Legion of Doom, whose members were well-heeled white boys from all over America. The Masters of Deception were the sons of blue-collar folk, largely living in New York.
In their book of reportage about these fancy goings-on, Masters of Deception: The Gang that Ruled Cyberspace, Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner write about one fine day in 1990 when several hackers were yakking on-line:
“Yo, dis is Dope Fiend from MOD,” the newcomer says in distinctly non-white, non-middle class, non-Texan inflection.
One of the Texans (who knows who?) takes umbrage.
“Get that nigger off the line!”
Needless to say, John Lee did not take the comment without offense. In fact, the MOD and the LOD “waged war,” which led to all sorts of high-tech shenanigans, involving security companies and serious offenses, and an FBI sting operation that showed the old folk how the new folk were changing the world, with bytes and bits and data gone mad. At one point, an entire grid of AT&T’s Eastern Seaboard service went completely down. These boys were trouble, but a new kind of trouble.
John Lee appeared later on magazine covers and on 60 Minutes. He wore dreadlocks, and had gold capped teeth, and appeared “down,” as they say in the “hood.” And he was indicted and ultimately sentenced to a year in jail and three years of suspension, and two hundred hours of community service and a fifty-dollar fine. By this time, he had been a student at Brooklyn College and seemed, in many ways, unrepentant. Who can say?
Nonetheless, I followed the news reports of these guys I had left behind, or who had left me behind. (Who knows? I might have become a hacker had I remained in the wonderful world of computers; I certainly had the interest and the inclination.) It struck me how the cause of this “war” between these two groups of pubescent hotshots had been precipitated by the onslaught of a very low-tech ideology, something that Texas hacker had inherited from a country almost three hundred years old, and a culture over four hundred years old, where a boy with the intelligence to bulldog multinational corporations and government agencies in cyberspace was reduced to being just another nigger.
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The term cyberspace actually had been invented in, of all places, a science-fiction novel, published in 1982. Neuromancer, by William Gibson, was a departure from most science fiction of its day, which had, over the decades, become dominated by space operas of little green men and postapocalyptic danger-scapes. In truth, the late Philip K. Dick had been the prophet for the sort of writing that Gibson would almost singlehandedly create, called cyberpunk. But it was Gibson’s crystal-clear vision of a world not destroyed by the bomb but overrun by international conglomerates that have gobbled one another up, and megalopolises that covered entire coasts, and of the gap between rich and poor becoming a chasm, and of artificial intelligent life, of the hacker-like specialists called “cowboys” who “jacked” into an electronic world of data where information was in some way seen, and where one could lose one’s life. This man-made world of the data-stream Gibson dubbed “cyberspace,” and the phrase stuck.
Nowadays it is hard to find someone who has not heard of cyberspace or Vice President Al Gore’s information highway; hard to find someone not impacted by personal computers and Windows and Macintosh and email and the Internet and the World Wide Web; hard to find someone who is not, as William Gibson had been, more than a little skeptical about the whole evolution of technological might.
I particularly like the phrase created by cultural critic Scott Bukatman, “Terminal Identity.” Image addiction, mediascape, virtual space. Already most Americans live most of their lives virtually: through television, or through a screen, or at a terminal, or over the phone. This way of living is not new news, it is self-evident; moreover, these modes and manners are reshaping what it means to be American, and, in some ways, what it means to be human, and yes, what it means to be Black.
Call it Terminal Blackness.
William Jordan Jr., an electrical engineer, and his brother, Rodney, a software designer, wanted to test their concept of “the uncut black experience”—blacks marketing to blacks and controlling the experience.
And what better way to do that than to use the Internet’s World Wide Web? It offers small black businesses an inexpensive way to market goods and services to a vast audience of blacks and others. An estimated 10 million to 30 million people worldwide use the Internet.
—“Black Businesses on the Internet: A Market that Was ‘Invisible Until Now,’ ” New York Times, September 4, 1995
For many Americans, the expanding universe of computers lies somewhere in the imagination between Buck Rogers and “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Wondrous and neat. But if you happen to be an African-American, the same gadgets may evoke less benign images. Try racially segregated schools, back-of-the-bus seating and town halls buzzing with angry white males.
Farfetched? Well, consider this: blacks spend several billion dollars a year on consumer electronics, but relatively few plunk down for computers. As PCs rapidly rewire the ways this country works, plays, learns and communicates, blacks are simply not plugging in to what feels like an alien, unwelcoming place. Certainly economics and education are also powerful handicaps to computer ownership. The average household income for blacks is $25,409; for whites, it is $40,708. But dollars and diplomas don’t fully explain why some black professors let their university-issued computers gather dust. There are other important causes of this computer gap, reasons that are rooted in African-American history, culture and psychology.
—“CyberSoul Not Found,” Newsweek, July 31, 1995
What, some will ask, does this have to do with being Black?
There exists a company called It’s a D.C. Thang that sells T-shirts with “an African American flavor” over the World Wide Web. There is Carlos A. Howard Funeral Homes, “the first funeral home on the Internet,” whose owners are Black. There is Melanet and there is NetNoir and there is Sphinx Communications and Black News Network and Afrinet and AfriTech and the African American Information Network, and an entire host of other local bulletin boards and forums. Many of these online companies belong to what is known as the BPON, or Black Pioneers of the Net network. Organizations like the National Urban League have set up training centers across the nation to teach Black folk computer literacy, as have mammoth computer firms like AT&T and Microsoft.
The truth of the matter is that the cost of a computer, for a family, for an individual, in the last few years of the twentieth century, is affordable. Indeed, most poor folks in the United States own a car—for it is a necessity in most parts of the country, and the cost of a computer is a fraction of a used car. Moreover, libraries and schools make access to computers easier and easier every day. The question then shifts to the user: Does a person value the machine enough, and the learning and the skills needed to use one? Already, people I know who work for any large corporation or university or college or library or museum or bookstore, etc., communicate through email and record invoices. What are we saying when we dismiss that percentage of African Americans who do value the power of this Brave New Cyberworld? Are they any less Black? And, according to all the numbers, they are getting more and more company, day by day.
I am not eager to say that any of these new ways of existing on the planet are bad, nor am I quick to say that they are all good. A person always runs the risk of being either a reactionary or a booster, when the prosaic truth usually runs somewhere towards the middle.
All that said, I nonetheless find this development not only tantalizing, but at the heart of my original question(s) about identity. This thing we call being Black, does it exist outside of our bodies? Where, indeed, am I Black? On my skin? In my mind?
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Originally I did it for writing.
I wrote my first novel out in longhand, and then typed each page up on an IBM Selectric typewriter, and then entered the final copy onto an old Xerox computer. My second book was also written first in longhand, on yellow legal pads, but I then entered the changes on a secondhand IBM knockoff that had no hard drive. In 1991, I purchased what was then a state-of-the-art portable computer on which to write and take notes. One day, three years later, out of the blue, this computer gave up the ghost, and I was forced to buy a new one because I had become habituated to the damned thing functioning as a fancy typewriter. This new computer was a sleek laptop that amazed me with its elegance, its small size, its speed, its Windows operating system; I was slowly seduced out of my stance as a pseudo-Luddite.
I returned home, to Chapel Hill, the year the media machine discovered the Internet. TV shows, magazines, books practically yelled about the new “computer revolution.” In ten years, what had been essentially the province of geeks and scientists and hackers had become, in the words of politicians and marketeers, “mainstream.” I was then in North Carolina’s triangle, Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, one of America’s most congenial brain trusts, the area situated between the University of North Carolina, North Carolina State, and Duke University, known as Research Triangle Park, the gift of North Carolina’s forward-looking, long-time Democratic governor James B. Hunt, who created this enterprise zone to lure large corporations to build laboratories and factories, taking advantage of the atmosphere, the forests, the universities, and the PhDs.
At dinner parties, everybody was talking about the joys and hardships of email; friends were telling me about staying up all night surfing the Net; I was hearing strange things about being “on-line.” After a while, I was beginning to feel left out, and intrigued.
Ten years after I had thought my computer use was going to be minimal at best, and I would never again learn a computer language, I was back in Chapel Hill, owning yet another computer, this one faster than fast, with massive storage, a modem and three Internet accounts; I bought loads of books that told me all sorts of information about FTP and Gopher and Veronica and Mosaic and Listservers and Usenet and Telnet. I sat amazed, for this was far from the days of a monochrome screen, with awkward, unattractive type flashing at your bewildered retinas at 3:00 a.m. No, this was a multicolored world of pictures and images and bells and whistles and information, information, information. I was fast becoming drunk with the stuff.
Presently, I found myself on-line, and what an amazing world that was, all fresh and new and cyber-wonderful. I explored, I lurked. I visited chat rooms, my eyes aflash with curiosity; my mind afire with the possibilities of this humming new mechanism. Here I was in my room in Carrboro, North Carolina, talking to folk in New Zealand, in Nigeria, in China, in Passaic, New Jersey. I say talk, but what we were doing was typing at one another; who they were, who I was, was largely immaterial; in truth, at the time, I deeply believe we were all, essentially, in love with the concept. We were netizens.
One fine night, I found myself on America Online, chatting with a man who said he was Black and living in Los Angeles. We fell into a typersation about this and that. By and by, why I don’t now remember, we began to discuss basketball. I allowed as how I was no good at the game, and probably went on too long about my feelings of insecurity, especially after having gone to a basketball-crazy place like UNC. Without preamble or warning, this cyberNegro typed: “Well, I got to get outta here and git wit some real niggas.” And blipped off on his merry way.
Now objectively there is nothing remarkable about this minor incident. Folk on the Internet tended, and still tend, to be ruder to folk than they would be face-to-face; there is something about the electronic anonymity engendered by the beast that makes people insensitive. No, the thing that got my goat, stuck in my craw, angered the hell out of me, was the content of his aspersion. Here, after years of seeking out the nature of Blackness, after talking to so many Black folk, after reading, discussing, debating, investigating the nature of Blackness, here I was being accused of not being Black. That stung. That hurt.
