of the age-old American stereotypes of the uppity Negro, the Zip Coon, the minstrel-show caricature of the black man who so earnestly aspired to symbols of white success that white people found it funny to watch him fail.
The stereotype solidified in the context of working-class pride, in the racist jokes told by customers and hangers-on in my dad’s shop. “What does Pontiac stand for? Poor Old Nigger Thinks It’s A Cadillac.” The resentment of black aspirations compounded among the low-income white Southerners whose ancestors had built their wealth on the backs of slaves and then lost it in the wake of the Civil War. When their great-great-grandparents lost their slaves, they lost the free labor at the foundation of their economy; now, generations into the future, any new gain for black people still came to feel like a new loss for whites. The more they got, went the thinking, the less left for us. So my dad’s friends shook their heads at the rappers on television and climbed back into their dented and rusted pickup trucks, convincing themselves they didn’t need to dream about gold chains and Cadillacs; they had everything a man could ever want, right there in small-town Kentucky.
•
I remember looking forward to leaving.
I grew up on the border between Eubank and Science Hill, Kentucky, with an unwavering certainty that I lived in a place that people on TV did not want to come from. I used to stand in the woods and pretend I was standing in Central Park, out for a quick run before I headed back to my Upper West Side high-rise. In real life I lived between the woods and a pig farm. If my family wanted a pizza delivered, we had to drive one town over and meet the driver at the edge of his territory—the Junior’s Food Mart parking lot. I spent a lot of time reading library books and listening to bootleg rap cassettes bought at the truck stop. I spent a lot of time in the woods. A lot of time bouncing a tennis ball against the side of the house and wishing I were somewhere different.
My childhood home, where my mother still lives, had once been a one-room schoolhouse. Old couples, former students at the school-house, would stop by to marvel at how far they’d gotten from where they began. My father ran an auto-body repair shop from the shack he and his friends built out back; he made the outsides of cars look pretty but could not keep our own car running. At the end of our gravel driveway, the white-and-black metal sign for Mike’s Body Shop; two nights after Daddy bought and installed the sign, some asshole drove past and threw a rock out his car window. The impact left a cracked asterisk, which over the years turned into a softball-sized starburst of rust.
I swept cigarette butts into a pile on the body-shop floor and watched my father prep cars for paint jobs, protecting headlights and windshields with newspaper and masking tape, with its sweet chemical smell. I used to chew on masking tape rolls, ruin them with my teeth imprints. One of my first words was Bondo, a putty used to fill in dents in the bodies of automobiles. Bondo comes in two little tubes: mix the white chemicals with the red chemicals and it dries Pepto-Bismol pink. Sand it smooth and breathe in the cloud of pale pink dust. Daddy always had a coat of Bondo dust in his hair, which made it look grayer than it already was. And on his clothes, which made them look more worn out and faded than they already were.
I found comfort in the paint fumes and the heat from the wood stove even as the cars my dad painted promised escape: semi-truck cabs with silhouettes of big-breasted women airbrushed onto the back windows, a van with a New York license plate and a thick Brooklyn phone book shoved between the console and the passenger seat. I looked up landmarks mentioned in rap songs—Biz Markie’s Albee Square Mall, MC Lyte’s Empire Rollerdrome. I knew they were real places, of course, but holding that phone book in my hands somehow made them more tangible. I called Albee Square Mall and when somebody answered I hung up, my heart racing like I was calling to ask out a girl.
What began as escapism opened my ears to perspectives some of my classmates rejected. I can’t say that at nine years old I set out to listen to rap music to hear stories of how it felt to be black in America, but those messages did come to resonate with me. Black History Month at my elementary school taught me that Martin Luther King had a dream, but Public Enemy taught me that two decades after his murder they still didn’t celebrate his birthday in Arizona. School showed me the grandfatherly George Washington Carver, but X-Clan name-dropped the militant Nat Turner and Huey Newton. I heard Q-Tip say Soul on Ice and I sought out Eldridge Cleaver’s prison memoir by that name at the public library. I watched Prince Paul introduce a De La Soul video about the power of being an individual by saying, “If you take three glasses of water and put food coloring in them, you have many different colors, but it’s still the same old water,” and I wanted to believe he was not just pointing out the lack of logic to racism, but welcoming a white kid in Kentucky into the hip-hop fold. When I felt ashamed to whisper “free lunch” to the cafeteria workers at school, I thought about the rappers who wrote such compelling songs about growing up in housing projects. It was childish escapism, not much different from watching cowboy movies or mafia flicks, but it developed into a lifelong allegiance to one of hip-hop’s distinct iterations of the American Dream—the idea of making it out of a place by telling its story so vividly.
The place you’re from follows you when you’re dealing with a music genre where the artists still shout out the housing projects they left behind decades ago, and stars from Ali Shaheed Muhammad to J. Cole put their actual childhood street addresses in their music. Their journeys toward fame and fortune had me planning a similar route of my own as I traveled down gravel roads on the school bus, crammed between the window and a man-sized fifth-grader named Jonas, who lived on the pig farm one stop before my house. When we dropped off Jonas, kids would yell, “Soo-ey! Slop them pigs, Jonas!” Our bus driver, Zenith—who was missing fingers from a table-saw accident—would point his index stump at them and tell them to shut up. How did Science Hill get its name? When it came to evolution or climate change, people there were defiantly anti-science. “The community,” the Internet tells me, “was named by geologist William J. Bobbitt, who visited to gather and analyze the local rocks.”3 Makes sense. There was nothing much more exciting to do.
I don’t mean to say it was Mayberry. Our county sheriff: shot in the head by an Oxycontin addict hired for the hit by the other man running for sheriff. My mother’s across-the-street neighbor: shot in the face over cocaine. My wife’s brother, who swears his Bible tells him blacks are “a cursed people”: shot in the stomach by rival meth dealers. Yet we scared ourselves away from big-city crime. They’ll steal the Nikes right off your feet out there. They’ll pull you right out of your car. I listened to rappers sound the alarm about police violence before I ever saw four white cops beat Rodney King on the streets of LA, but my classmates were more moved by the riots that took place after the cops were acquitted. My classmates, with their truck-driver dads, watched four black men pull Reginald Denny from the cab of his semi truck and beat him nearly to death in the street. By God, that could have been me, they thought, but they couldn’t see themselves in King. They justified the cops beating King because of the fact that he was drunk, high, and driving erratically, then they headed home to drink beer, smoke weed, and crash their cars into farmers’ fences. My neighbors watched South Central Los Angeles burn and congratulated themselves on living in South Central Kentucky and passing on to their kids a mentality that didn’t encourage them to expand their horizons so much as ask why would anyone want to.
Here’s the conundrum: I made it out of a place so insular and sure of itself because I was sure I was better than the people who thought that way. I thought I was too good to go to the community college a few miles from the house I grew up in. I wanted to leave Kentucky in my rearview mirror and go to college in New York or Boston, but my mother, who’d told me since preschool that I was going to college, begged me to stay close to home.
When I decided to leave home to attend college two hours away in “the big city” of Louisville, my older cousin, the long-haul trucker, shared a piece of worldly advice: “Just make sure you don’t get caught out in Niggertown.”
“Are you sure you want to live up there in Louisville,” asked a friend’s older sister. I asked what she meant and she huffed and then said, in a tone like she was speaking the name of a disease I might catch, “Niggers.”
Black people had congregated in cities like Louisville,