Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America. - book reviews

American Visions, April-May, 1994 by David Nicholson

A fail to assimilate experience characterizes one autobiography heralded (and sold to the movies) well in advance of publication--Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America (Random House, 1994), by Nathan McCall. Like last year's Monster: The Autobiograpby of an L.A. Gang Member (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993) by Sanyika Shakur, a.k.a. Monster Kody Scott, McCall's book fits squarely within the pseudopolitical confessional genre pioneered by Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on Ice. A decade ago, these "bad nigger stories" would have been issued by Holloway House, purveyor of classics of the literature of degradation, such as the memoirs of the pimp "Iceberg Slim."

McCall, whom I have met only once, is a reporter at the Washington Post. He grew up in a nominally middle-class family in Portsmouth, Va. His father, a Navy veteran, worked two jobs after retiring from the service. His mother appears--it is unclear from the narrative--to have been a housewife. Barely 20, and still on probation for assault after shooting another man in the chest, McCall was arrested after he and two friends robbed a McDonald's. Convicted, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison, of which he served only three. After he was paroled, he attended Norfolk State University, graduated, and went into journalism.

McCall pulls few punches in this confessional. From the beginning we are treated to gratuitous cruelty--he and his brothers tortured frogs as boys; he participated in a gang rape; he and his friends went looking for white boys to beat up. The excuse for the last is racism, the same excuse McCall offers for all of his failures.

Oddly, the book offers few concrete examples of racism. Mostly there is this kind of speculation: Writing of the discomfort of hearing his father called by his first name by a white employer, McCall observes, "I'm certain that that period marked my realization of something it seemed white folks had been trying to get across to me for most of my young life--that there were two distinct worlds in America, and a different set of rules for each: The white one was full of the possibilities of life. The dark one was just that--dark and limited."

Racism, of course, always has been a given in America. Yet juxtaposing two examples of black men's writing from a time when race limited the lives of black men in ways we can hardly imagine shows just how far short McCall falls in comparison.