Cold Drank

ON PAROLE: UNCLE JIMMY, OBAMA, HIP HOP (NIGGAS) AND ME – THE MIXTAPE

“But like you, Uncle Jimmy, I did and didn’t give a fuck. I broke bets I made with myself, defied authority and was lazy about most things of substance. And I did all of this, Uncle Jimmy, with a warning in mind. You were that warning. ‘You driving my sister crazy now,’ Aunt Sue told me the night I drove my Mama into a nervous breakdown ‘and you heading down the road of Jimmy.’ The Jimmy road, like the Emmett Till road, ran adjacent to the refined, sanitized curbed avenues of how sisters, aunts, Mamas, Grandmas wanted black boys to behave. I feared the road to Jimmy because the road seemed so painful and inevitable. Whatever consumed you would eventually consume me. Even as I sprinted away to schools in Ohio, then Indiana and now New York, if I looked down I saw familiar footprints and artifacts of the Jimmy road. That’s what I felt before this summer, before Mama called and said that Grandma had found you dead.” ON PAROLE: UNCLE JIMMY, OBAMA, HIP HOP (NIGGAS), AND ME- THE MIXTAPE page 188

ON PAROLE is provocative mixed-genre work of biocriticsm that examines the nuanced relationship between black American nephews and uncles. Through essays, stories, letters and jokes, written to my Uncle Jimmy, the book explores the conventional mode of parole as “an earned extension of the police state,” as well as the original meaning of parole as “spoken word”. The book seeks to connect Obama, Uncle Jimmy, Hip Hop (Niggas) and me, while examining the extent to which our bodies and our spoken words are at once methodically policed and incessantly privileged.

Barack Obama, when asked why he continued to attend the church pastored by the “America hating” Reverend Jeremiah Wright said “He’s is like an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I don’t agree with. And I suspect there are some of the people in this room who have heard relatives say some things that they don’t agree with …” Obama’s response was as much a public acceptance of his relationship with Uncle Jeremiah as it was a public defense of his relationship to critical spoken words of Reverend Wright.

The Wright experience proved pivotal because it created just enough fear in the minds and bodies of some Americans that Barack might not be that exceptional, race transcendent, exceptional African American they wanted to believe in. If he could have an intimate relationship with the man and the words of that church, some feared that Barack might be – gulp – just another angry nigga. In a calculated move, Obama distanced himself from the disagreeable words of his Uncle while positioning himself as a responsible, loving nephew. He continued this distancing in the Father’s Day speech where he rhetorically disciplined black men for being irresponsible.

While the archetypical relationship between crazy uncle and responsible nephew doesn’t have its root in black American culture, Obama’s “old uncle” comment alludes to a private discourse between paroled black nephews and their uncles. The post civil rights era marked, among other things, the end of black American fathers in the home (and black uncles became more important) and the proliferation of the prison industrial complex (which ultimately created more literal black male parolees). While much has been written about the relationship between black boys and their single mothers or black boys and their often absent or exceptionally present fathers, the relationship (and most importantly, the “words lining the relationship”) between black Uncles and black nephews has been wholly unexplored in compelling, literate and entertaining ways.

Obama, like many black American nephews, spoke from the perspective of a black boy raised by a single mother and a village of other women, with no father, but plenty of “old uncles” around. In a culture, renown for its oral tradition and proclivity for bending, breaking and breathing life into standard spoken English, crazy black uncles are edified as much for their uses of language as their behavior. While Barack’s response was crafted for public consumption, one wonders what are the peculiar contours of verbal relationships between black uncles and nephews. This peculiarity, or wonder is at the core of ON PAROLE: UNCLE JIMMY, OBAMA, HIP HOP (NIGGAS) AND ME.

Our nation and world are wholly obsessed with actions and words that black boys use when addressing each other. This is evident in the continued relevance of Hip Hop music/ culture and the growing fields of Hip Hop fiction and scholarship. It’s also evident in the popularity of black comedy and professional athletes. Writer, Robert Marriot when asked about the mass popularity of hip hop, comedy, basketball and boxing, said “White folks love to watch black boys doing what we like to do when they aren’t watching. For a lot of us, that means rapping, playing and fighting. But do they get irony and understand the stakes? I wonder.”

ON PAROLE is at least partially invested in the same work visited in Hill Harper’s Letters to a Young Brother: MANifest Your Destiny and Ta-Nehisi Coates The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. While both of these critically and financially successful books have black masculinity as their nexus, on parole places Uncles generally and specifically, my Uncle Jimmy Coleman as its primary audience. The sixteen tracks of book are framed by an initial letter written to Uncle Jimmy the night after he cleans himself up and brings his mother some fish with the words “Mama’s fish” on the paper bag, and ends with a letter to Jimmy, chronicling his sudden death and remarkable funeral. “Uncle Jimmy,” I write, “some events of the last few years have me feeling, thinking about how important it is for little nephews like me to engage honestly with angry, elegant, crack-addicted uncles like you. I want to talk with about living and dying on/in parole.”

In addition to exploring the slanted love of nephews and uncles, ON PAROLE is most interested in the ways black artists use the often ironic language of the boast, confessional and critique as a way of communicating primarily with other black people, even if an immediate audience black Americans is not present. This mode of communication is often evident in music, speech and stand-up comedy but rarely in literature. Hence, the “mixtape” serves as a postscript and a reminder that the written words of the book should also be heard as much as they are read. The essays in the book are critical, creative and narrative. The form is greatly inspired by Baldwin’s book of essays Nobody Knows My Name and Notes of a Native Son but the world has yet to see anything like ON PAROLE: UNCLE JIMMY, OBAMA, HIP HOP (NIGGAS) AND ME — THE MIXTAPE.

One Response: