Makes Me Wanna Holler

The feud with the Cherry Boys ended when Cavalier Manor went to war with the kids from downtown. Everyone in Cavalier Manor banded together to defeat the enemy. As the school year progressed, the battles intensified. McCall saw his first action at 16 years old, when a party devolved into a shootout. McCall recalls, “I was so thrilled to be in the thick of the action that I didn’t have sense enough to be scared” (75), adding that“[i]t looked like TV footage of Vietnam” (75). The war eventually got so bad that police intervened, and it became a three-way battle:“I grew accustomed to being confronted by lawmen wherever I went. It fed my already deep hatred for them” (76). However, he also feared the police, which made clear his choice to “[s]hoot at downtown boys and avoid the cops” (76).

McCall had his first real interaction with the legal system during this feud. McCall, Shane, Bimbo, and Chip were caught with an arsenal of guns and cut a deal for a year’s probation in return for providing the police with the names of people they knew who had guns. The group gave the police bogus information, but it worked to get them probation instead of prison time.

The war ended after a shootout between Cavalier Manor, downtown, and the police resulted in the death of a downtown guy named Prairie Dog. It was unclear who fired the bullet that killed Prairie Dog, but Black Panther representatives pounced on the incident as “an opportunity to use Prairie Dog’s death as a rallying point and recruiting tool” (82). Just as the feud between McCall’s group and the Cherry Boys was trumped by the war, the war was trumped by the more important racial struggle against the city’s white population. 

A big generational divide existed in this era between young black men and older black men, pertaining to work. McCall’s stepfather’s life and the lives of most black men in his generation were controlled by work: “Cut from the civil rights mold, he believed blacks could overcome racism by slaving hard and making do with what little they had. But our more militant generation was less inclined to make those kinds of compromises” (86).

To endure the race-related pressures of work, most black fathers turned to alcohol:“The Black Power movement signaled an end to the day when blacks bowed humbly to white folks—yet there we were, literally on our hands and knees, working for white folks” (86). McCall and his friends sought lives similar to Turkey Buzzard’s father’s life. He was a hustler and had nice things while the rest of their fathers worked constantly for nothing, but most importantly, he made his money outside of the white man’s system: “[W]e wanted to be the opposite of our fathers. We didn’t want to work for the white man and end up like them” (87).

McCall writes that “[t]here was nothing more frustrating to me than looking for work” (87). Black teenagers had a completely different summer job experience than white teenagers, who had an inside track to the best jobs, which would teach them things and “keep them from slaving on the back of some truck in the scorching heat” (88). McCall applied for good work, but he was looked at like he was crazy and treated as an annoyance. The only contacts the parents of black kids had, if any, were for manual labor jobs.

At 16, McCall obtained a construction job through a bricklayer in their family’s church. The manager, a white man, had wanted someone else for the job and treated McCall brutally:

The construction job forced me to develop two personalities that kept me in conflict with myself: Away from work I was the baad-assed nigger who demanded respect; on the job I was a passive Negro who let the white man push him around (89).

The job ended for McCall after his stepfather picked him up from work in his Cadillac. The manager instigated McCall into an outburst and used it as an excuse to fire him, but later admitted to the bricklayer who got McCall the job that he fired him because “if [McCall’s] stepfather had money to buy a Cadillac, then [he] didn’t need a job” (90). After that, McCall’s attitude was this: “If getting’ a job means I gotta work for the white man, then I don’t want a motherfuckin’ job” (90). McCall turned to hustling.

McCall and his friends began an “extended binge” of theft. They stole everything they could and either flipped it or consumed it:“The main reason we hustled and stole so hard was to pick up money to buy clothes” (94). Stealing helped the boys stay fashionable, which got them respect and girls. McCall’s mother suspected him of doing things he shouldn’t, but she wasn’t able to discourage his behavior.

Around this time, most of McCall’s friends quit high school to join the military: “In light of all that was happening in the streets, school often seemed like a helluva waste of time” (95). McCall didn’t quit, but he also didn’t put much effort in, more concerned with boosting his cash flow on the streets than grades. None of the boys felt like they had a future beyond Portsmouth, so school didn’t seem as important as the streets:

Beyond their enthusiastic backing of star athletes, many white teachers at Wilson seemed unconcerned whether black students passed or failed. They weren’t committed to preparing [them] for life in the real world like [McCall’s] black junior high school teachers were (96).

McCall “wondered how [he] could ‘make something’ of [him]self in the fucking white man’s world” (97).

With most of his group now gone, McCall teamed up with two older guys, Holt and Hilliard, who taught him how to do B&E’s: breaking and entering homes and stealing possessions. McCall learned the ropes from the two older guys and made some money, then teamed up with Shell Shock to do them on their own. Holt and Hilliard eventually got busted and went to prison, and McCall stopped after a scare during a B&E. McCall and Shell Shock looked for more lucrative hustles, and after trying a few things, they settled on stick-ups (armed robbery). Stick-ups were very easy, but they were a crossover for the boys into serious crime. McCall became addicted: “There was an almost magical transformation in my relationship with the rest of the world when I drew that gun on folks” (101). He had found his hustle.

In 1972, Superfly fever took over black America. The movie was about a slick-dressing drug dealer on a mission to make enough money to never have to work for the white man again. The movie and the soundtrack were instant successes:

Here was a film that gave us something rare in movies—a black hero—and expressed the frustrations of a lot of young brothers, who were so fed up with the white man that they were willing to risk prison, and even death, to get away from him (102).

Superfly showed the drug trade as a way to operate outside the white man’s system. Shell Shock started dealing drugs with the goal of raising enough money to start a straight business, then get out of the game and be self-supported, and never have to rely on the white man. It was far-fetched, but to them “it was no more far-fetched than the civil rights notion that white people would welcome [them] into their system with open arms if [they] begged and prayed and marched enough,” and it was no different a path to wealth than influential white families like the Kennedys (103). McCall had no interest in the drug trade, though, as it was too time-consuming, and he had money coming in from the stick-ups. He writes:

The irony of the sound tracks to Superfly and The Mack is that they both contained songs with strong anti-drug, pro-black messages. I was so caught up in the glitz and glamour of the street-smart stars that those messages went right over my head. Also lost on me was the contradiction in the whole notion of getting over. Drug dealers and pimps operate on familiar turf, preying on their own people. But like so many other guys, I reasoned that the end justified the means—any hustle that kept you out of the system was justifiable (105). 

McCall changed schools his senior year to a newly-built school called Manor High. McCall was gripped with fear the entire year: “Graduation would mean that [he] was one step closer to having to deal with the white man” (108). The only good thing about his senior year was his budding romance with Elisabeth Miller, a smart downtown girl who frequently traveled to New York for her modeling career. Liz didn’t know the specifics of the street crimes McCall was into, but she knew he was a street dude into a lot of things, and she loved him anyway. McCall recalls, “[u]sually, I hung with girls just long enough to get over, then made my way back to the block. But Liz had a magnetic personality. She made me want to be around her all the time” (109).

McCall did things with Liz that he had never done before, things seemingly normal but foreign to McCall, given the limited exposure of his upbringing, and she made him feel emotions he didn’t know he had: “I got the vague sense that there was so much to life that I was missing. But it all seemed so remote and out of my reach” (110). He felt like he was in a fairytale. He stopped running women and focused solely on Liz. McCall and Liz were even crowned homecoming king and queen, and then, less than a month later, they found out they were pregnant. McCall accepted his new responsibilities, graduated high school, and enrolled in college, still frightened of the world he was entering. “The carefree days were officially over” (112), as he now “had a pregnant girlfriend and the promise of a life in the white man’s world with a hard way to go” (113). 

McCall writes that “Liz went into labor July 19, 1973” (114). Liz delivered a boy just after midnight. They named him Monroe, after his paternal grandfather:“I had little say in the matter since I hadn’t donated time and money to help Liz through the pregnancy” (114). McCall didn’t feel a connection to Monroe. Instead, he felt fearful and empty.

McCall began studying psychology at Norfolk State, a historically-black college with open admissions. For a year, he was attentive and achieved good grades. Reverend Elward Ellis, a philosophy professor, and Hugh Jones, an English professor, along with some supportive members of the community, kept McCall interested and he finished his freshman year with a 3.0 grade point average. It didn’t take long, however, for McCall to become discouraged. He didn’t feel like he fit in at college, lost motivation, and became distracted by drugs and the streets. He left college soon after.

Plaz, the guy who raped McCall’s sixth-grade girlfriend, Denise, hung with Scobie-D and was disrespecting Liz. One night at a carnival, after Plaz disrespected McCall in an altercation with Liz, McCall’s anger toward Plaz over both Denise and Liz boiled over and he shot Plaz in the chest, in the middle of the carnival: “Gone was the fierceness that made him so intimidating all those years. In its place was shock and fear. It was more like terror. In that moment, I felt like God” (119).

McCall’s friend, Greg, drove him back to his house, where he told his stepfather, who drove him to the police station to confess: “I got a sharp vision of who I really was. I realized I didn’t want to be a cold-blooded, baad-assed nigger anymore. I wanted to erase the past few hours, to wipe the slate clean” (121). Plaz pulled through and McCall was released: “The gravity of what I’d done sank in again, but this time, I looked at it in an entirely different light. Now that I was certain Plaz would live, I felt hard again and I thought about the glory […] I was a bona fide crazy nigger” (121). McCall’s attorney negotiated a deal: he claimed that McCall shot in self-defense and McCall got thirty days in jail for assault, which he could serve on weekends; a $300 fine for possession of a firearm; and one year on probation. A few years later, Plaz shot and killed a guy, and he “went away to prison for a long, long time” (122). 

McCall writes:

One thing I’ve learned: The mind is like the body. If you don’t work actively to protect its health, you can lose it, especially if you’re a black man, nineteen years old and wondering, as I was, if you were born into the wrong world. The tricky thing about the mind is that when it’s deeply troubled, it can shift tracks on you. It keeps working; you are thinking, but the mind shifts from logic to illogic without you being aware (123).

Parental responsibilities were too much for McCall, so he started cheating on Liz with women who didn’t have children. He still couldn’t connect with Monroe, his child, so he focused his attention on making money. By now, Shell Shock was making a lot of money selling drugs, so McCall decided to try also; however, “dealing wasn’t as easy as it seemed” (124). It was a round-the-clock hustle with thin margins, and it required restraint to not dip into the supply and a shrewd sense for money. McCall didn’t excel at dealing drugs. He wasn’t good at the math and “squandered a lot of cash just having fun” (125). He tried hiring Frog Dickie to work for him, but when Frog Dickie stole drugs from McCall, he couldn’t bring himself to punish his friend like he would need to if he wanted to stay in business: “That’s the nature of the drug game. Everybody is either looking to get a free high, trying to steal drugs, ripping off drug money, or all of the above” (126).

McCall’s failure as a drug dealer didn’t help his self-esteem, especially when he knew so many people making a lot of money doing it:

Dealing drugs is harder than any job I’ve had, then or since. To this day, I laugh when I hear folks say drug dealers are lazy people who don’t want to work. There’s no job more demanding than dealing drugs. It’s the only thing I’ve really tried hard to do, and failed at (127).

McCall’s temperament only got worse with time. He felt alone and out of place, and his life was going down the drain. He saw it happening, but couldn’t do anything about it: “The futility ran so deep that it festered and churned […] quietly making gunpowder” (131). He was drinking and getting high earlier in the day and he knew that if he didn’t do something, he’d become a drunk or a junkie: “Cavalier Manor was filled with other guys going through the same drug-induced decline” (131). The deeper they got into drugs, the less connected his group was to each other. After a stick-up one day, Shell Shock convinced McCall to rip off Cooder. McCall reasoned that if Shell Shock would rip off Cooder, he’d do the same to him, and stopped hanging with Shell Shock. 

Liz got a job as a salesclerk at a department store near Cavalier Manor. McCall came up with a hustle, and along with a few other salesclerks, they robbed the store blind and put it out of business:

By cleaning out the store and forcing it to close, we took away jobs that employed people in our community and we got rid of a business that brought revenue to the area. We didn’t view it that way at the time, but we did ourselves in (134).

After he put himself out of a hustle, he hooked up with Nutbrain and Charlie Gregg to go back to stickups. McCall writes that “Nutbrain was the mastermind of the team” (135). Every job they pulled was cased, planned, and thought out. They hit up businesses in the white section of Portsmouth and made a lot of money. At the same time, everyone around McCall was getting locked up and he feared it was only a matter of time before he’d be locked up, too: “Each time we went out on a job, I told myself it would be the last. And each time after that, I found a reason to go out one more time” (136).

One night, they went out to hit a Sheraton hotel, but the situation was off: the hotel was having an event that they weren’t anticipating, and there were people and police everywhere. Charlie Gregg missed the last lucrative hit though, and he was set on making one. They decided to do a last-minute, unplanned hit of a McDonald’s and everything went wrong: they missed the cash on its way to the van and decided instead to hit the store, but everyone in the store saw their faces and they didn’t know the getaway route. They made a wrong turn and drove down a dead end. When they doubled back, the police caught up with them and it was over.

McCall writes that after the botched robbery, “[i]t certainly felt to me like my life was over. I was twenty, half burned out on drugs, depressed, and hopelessly lost. At some point in life—long before I ever held a gun—I had lost control” (141). McCall’s family couldn’t afford a good lawyer this time and there were likely no deals to be made anyway. On the advice of his lawyer that he’d be sentenced to five years and eligible for parole in fifteen months, he dropped his demand for a jury trial and changed his plea to guilty. On April 11, 1975, McCall was sentenced to twelve years in prison, far more than anyone expected. The judge stated that McCall “has to learn that he can’t go around putting guns to people’s heads” (145). McCall writes:

A tearful Liz held her hands to her face in disbelief. My sobbing mother buried her face in my stepfather’s chest. And [R]everend Ellis stared blankly at the floor. When the bailiffs led me from the courtroom, I dropped my head to conceal my misty eyes (145).