Sag Harbor

“How does one measure infinity in a roller rink?”

Benji remembers a birthday party held at a roller-skating rink when he was in middle school. The tallest girl in his class, Emily Dorfman, asked him to skate during “couples skate,” and he is excited by their proximity as they circle the rink, seemingly endlessly. As the music plays, he feels exhilaration and glee at finally being a part of the “big boys club,” and he imagines many future episodes involving girls. His world seems infinite. However, the sense of the infinite is an illusion since the music for couples’ skate ends abruptly, and Emily rejoins the girls while he rejoins the boys. He tells the reader that his prediction about girls was wildly overstated.

“In idle moments, I retreated into that early-summer dream of reinvention, when you set your eyes on September and that refurbished self you were going to tool around in, honking the horn so people would take notice, driving slowly around all the right hot spots: Look at me.”

At the beginning of every summer, Benji has high hopes of re-inventing himself into a much cooler version of himself in contrast to the anxious, self-conscious boy he feels himself to be much of the time. When he meets up with NP, he tells NP he wants to go by “Ben.” By Labor Day, only one person has referred to him as Ben. He realizes he has not had a dramatic transformation like his sister Elena. Still, he has made small incremental steps toward change, which gives him a reason for optimism at the start of the school year, just as he was at the start of the summer.

“Already the couple was turning back.”

The boys observe a white couple “invade” their territory. They get annoyed at the seeming trespassing but do nothing. There is no need. The white couple turns back on their own once they realize that everyone on the beach is Black. The boys observe this, as they have observed the same behavior countless times before, and they are pleased when things go back to the way they were—white people on their beach and Black people on their beach.

“Respectable professions of need, after Jim Crow’s logic: white doctors won’t lay a hand on us, we have to heal ourselves; white people won’t deliver us to God, we must save ourselves; white people won’t throw dirt in our graves, we must bury ourselves. Fill a need well, and you prospered.”

Benji explains how the financial success of the Sag Harbor families was possible, ironically, because of Jim Crow segregation. Because white people would not serve the African American population as their doctors, teachers, and lawyers, African Americans had to prepare for those jobs themselves to survive and thrive. Their success in these careers allowed their families and descendants to benefit in countless ways, allowing for things like private schools and summers in Sag Harbor.

“They came up the steps to our house to fix themselves drinks, to use the bathroom, whether our parents were out or not. We sat up straight, stopped cursing, got into raised-right mode. They made gin and tonics and screwdrivers, moved TV dinners aside to get at the ice-cube trays, and asked when our parents were coming out.”

Although Benji’s parents come to Sag Harbor for only a few weekends that summer, there are adult eyes everywhere, and Benji and the boys know that when the adults are around they need to “straighten up” and show their good upbringing, acting one way in front of the adults and another way entirely when it’s just the boys.

“I’ve retraced my old routes to make sure what I know is plausible in the retelling, and to give a sporting chance to the Forgotten and the Repressed, those two overlooked cousins of ours there in the corner avoiding eye contact. (Chime in whenever, guys.)”

When Benji describes the shortcut he takes to go to Jonni Waffle, he makes this aside to the audience, assuring them of his attention to detail in narrating his story. This metacognition reminds the reader that it is the adult Benji telling the story of his youth, allowing for an ironic distance from the events of the story. Adult Benji is aware that there are gaps in his narration by humorously personifying the gaps as the awkward “cousins”—Forgotten and Repressed—who are also part of Benji’s audience.

“He’d grown up poor, fighting his way home every day off Lenox Avenue, and any hint that he hadn’t escaped, that all his suffering had been for naught, kindled his temper and his deep fear that aspiration was an illusion and the Street a labyrinth without exit, a mess of connecting alleys and avenues always leading back into itself. So no gold chains, no.”

This brief background for the father helps to explain some of the harsh lessons he imparts to Benji. Unlike Benji and unlike Benji’s mother, the father had a much harder life growing up poor in the inner city. He is now a successful doctor, but he still has insecurities about his upbringing, fearing any symbolism that would tie him back to his childhood. He forbids his boys from mimicking any street culture, such as wearing gold chains.

“He whispered, ‘Take something, man,’ but before I could even think about it, I heard Sidney Poitier’s voice in my head and in that crisp, familiar, so-dignified tone, he declared, ‘They think we steal, and because they think we steal, we must not steal.’” 

When NP abuses his “pint privileges” at Jonni Waffle, getting more ice cream than is allowed, Benji is critical of NP and then reflects on why he doesn’t steal. He hears Sydney Poitier’s voice in his head. Poitier, the first Black male actor to win the Academy Award, starred in many films dealing with race relations. Poitier’s dignified voice acts like Benji’s conscience, an inner voice guiding him into appropriate behavior.

“They were members of varied fraternities, yacht clubs, golf clubs, secret-handshake groups, they were strivers, inheritors, and the privileged bored.”

Benji describes the variety of people that enter the Jonni Waffle shop in a catalog of poetic imagery. In his litany of the various groups, the rich Hamptonites, the laborers, the retirees, the street cops, the locals, the caretakers, the painters, the writers, the celebrities, the waitresses, the deckhands, the au pairs, the weekenders, the heiresses, and the wasted clubbers, Whitehead presents a smorgasbord of humanity all united in their deep desire for Jonni Waffle’s ice cream.

“There was a lot of Other Family going around that summer. People disappeared. I asked, ‘What happened to the Peterses?’ and my mother responded, ‘Oh, it turned out Mr. Peters had another family, so they don’t come out anymore.’ And what happened to the Barrowses, hadn’t seen those guys in a while, Little Timmy with his crutches. ‘Oh it turned out Mr. Barrows had another family so they’re selling the house.’”

Benji is fascinated by this epidemic of Other Families. Benji is powerfully ruled by tradition and nostalgia, and it’s surreal for him to consider the dissolution of a family that would result in divorce and an “other family.” It causes Benji to question reality—how could one distinguish the “real family” from the “other family?” Which family would retain the title of “real?” He imagines a father acting two completely different ways in one family vs the other family. There is a poignant reason for Benji’s fears, especially since he has found a note his mother wrote down, detailing her unhappiness with her marriage. Although Benji never explicitly states it, there is a threat to the “reality” of his own family.

“One Sunday morning my parents were watching the black affairs show Like It Is, when Gil Noble welcomed a psychologist who railed against Barbies and the cult of the blonde. […] He described a study where a group of black children was told to ‘pick the pretty doll,’ and when they passed over the brown princesses time after time, what was there to say? ‘Why are our children being taught to hate themselves?’ Barbie, Luke. Brainwashed by the Evil Empire.”

Benji discusses his love of Star Wars, detailing how he played with action figures, imagining himself first as the hero Luke Skywalker and then as the wise-cracking Han Solo. After seeing that show, he realizes that his identification with white superheroes is misguided. Eventually, he makes up a new character, a cousin to the bad guy Greedo. Unlike Greedo, the cousin was “a good kid, on the straight and narrow, unlike his bounty-hunting relative. […] In my room, Greedo’s cousin redeemed his people through his private war against the forces of evil. He was ‘a credit to his race’” (160). Benji’s creation of this new character allows him to be the good guy but also allows him to identify with a character of color. Still, Benji’s categorization of Greedo’s cousin by his race shows how internalized racism has become to him, as if his race needed to seek an outlier to gain credit.

“Lyrics from the aforementioned ‘Here We Go’ and then ‘Now I Gotta Wet’cha,’ copyright 1992 by Ice Cube, born the same year as me, who grew up on Run-D.M.C. like we all did. ‘Wet’cha,’ as in ‘wet your shirt with blood.’ All of us, the singers and the audience were of the same generation. Something happened. Something happened that changed the terns and we went from fighting (I’ll knock that grin off your face) to annihilation (I will wipe you from this Earth). How we got from here to there are the key passages in the history of young black men that no one cares to write. We live it instead.”

Earlier, Benji discussed how Run DMC’s “boasting about staying in school [represented] quaint days in the history of hip-hop” (170). Benji is shocked by the rapid evolution of hip-hop from those “quaint days” to Ice Cube, whose lyrics celebrate killing. Gangster rap, in highlighting the difficulties of inner-city life for African Americans, often depicts murder, drugs, and other crimes. Benji notes the significance of this development but he also says that society has not cared to explore the reason for this disturbing change.

“In 1997 when George Lucas rereleased his Star Wars trilogy, he fixed what he didn’t like using modern special-effects technology, erasing the mistakes of his youth. He had a secret compound and an entire nerd army dedicated to this purpose. In Greedo’s case, that meant rewriting the alien’s history. In the original movie, the green-skinned bounty hunter is going to deliver the reluctant hero Han Solo to the space-age Mafia don Jabba the Hut, so Han shoots him to prevent this. All those years later, that version of Han Solo, the one who shoots first, didn’t fit in with Lucas’s ideas of how a real hero acts. So he changed what happened. He redigitized the scene, inserted a laser blast of Greedo shooting first so that Han didn’t shoot someone in cold blood. Han was a hero, Greedo the villain. There. Fixed.”

Lucas’s revising of the iconic story of Star Wars was jarring to the dedicated, observant Star Wars fans, who lashed out at this changing of movie history to make Han Solo’s character more noble. Benji, also a Star Wars fan, says the change didn’t bother him. He was able to accept that there were two different characters, the first Greedo and the other Greedo, the first and second Han, and he found it easy to keep the two different versions alive in his imagination. This duality mirrors Benji’s own identity. Benji is acting as Lucas in his ability to revisit history and change meanings as needed, sometimes living with the various ways that he sees himself, embracing the contradictions and paradox.

“It was so different walking home without streetlights, especially once I got past the marina, where people had their boats lit up and were having a high old timed drinking and laughing. […] The farther I got from town the darker it got and there were fewer cars slowly nudging their way through the dark to light my path. The rain still hadn’t come, but the wind fussed the trees and this was the only sound I head. The candles and kerosene lanterns burned in the windows of the houses, pulsating in orange and yellow, showing the way, just as they had a hundred years ago. I couldn’t see the power lines and telephone and cable wires and I couldn’t make out the fancy cars in the driveways. Events had pulled the plug on the modern world. As if it had never been. The lights in the windows of the familiar old houses had guided the men home when they returned form sea, the earthbound constellations they recognized and trusted and steered by. I knew where I was. I had walked these streets my whole life. For a few minutes I was a true son of Eastvale, returning with my brothers in the dark down Bay Street and Hempstead Street after a good day’s work.”

In this evocative scene, Benji describes what Sag Harbor looks like during the blackout. The eerie lack of electricity stirs his imagination, and he can imagine the past—what Sag Harbor was like in the days before electricity during the whaling boom. Earlier he had struggled to conjure the past; the best he could do was imagine a few Black sailors returning to their home. Now he can imagine the entire scene, and he feels an integral part of this environment, a “true son” of Eastville as the modern world falls away. The ever-constant nagging feeling of not fitting in and feeling anxious about others disappears as he enjoys a satisfying feeling of belonging.

“My father, however, loved his special pair of old-school barber scissors, and we loved them, too, because the sound of the long, thin blades sniping against each other was the sound of his undivided attention.”

Benji looks forward to the haircuts his father gives to him as a child because of the “undivided attention” he received from his father. His tough father gently moves his head in different directions to give the best cut, a dramatic difference from when his father punched Benji in the face three times to teach him a lesson in being tough. This is a tender father-son moment. The moment is ephemeral. Within hours, the hair is disheveled, “a weird black amoeba” (196). Looking back at old photos, Benji realizes the hideousness of the haircuts. Still, he treasures his memory of the gentle touch as opposed to the father that beats him.

“I was well acquainted with all these sounds and heard the other silent things. This made no sound: my father stirring his drink with his finger. This also made no sound: that dreaded calculation, how many is that today? Certainly this made no sound: the understanding, I’m pushing my luck by hanging around here. And silent now but soon to make itself heard, the chemical reaction in his brain that said, Let’s get this hate in gear.”

Benji’s finely attuned perception of his father as he makes his drinks allows him to calibrate carefully how much alcohol the father has had. He hears things that make no sound because it’s clear that the father’s drinking is a familiar though terrifying routine to Benji. He knows that the father’s mood will become more volatile the more he drinks. The resentments that the father has been holding in will explode. They always do.

“‘That’s how they train it to attack black people,’ he explained. ‘That cracker in there tosses raw meat by the lawn jockey, the dog eats there every day and then when it sees black people it thinks, Food. You’re lucky it didn’t tear you apart.’”

When Benji and Reggie are almost attacked by a Doberman, the father returns with them to see the dog. When he sees a Black-faced lawn jockey nearby, he explains that the dog has been trained to associate Black people with food since the lawn jockey is Black as well. The father makes a point to say it’s not the dog’s fault because it is simply following how it was trained. The father has a deeper understanding of the threats Black people face, having grown up under more difficult circumstances than his sons, which helps to explain his brutality when he is drinking. His comments about training are ironic since he too is training his sons. When he wants to teach Benji to fight back against any racial insult, he brutally punches his son three times. Soon Benji is punching his classmates, just as his father trained him.

“Since I’d come over time to believe that no one was particularly interested in what I had to say, I tended to mumble or talk fast in an attempt to help people more easily ignore me, so I practiced adamant phrasings of facts like ‘I bought this ticket’ and ‘I paid money for this ticket.’”

Benji explains how he must practice sounding assertive to demand that the bouncers let him into the club even though he is under-aged. In explaining this strategy, he reveals his low self-esteem and passivity. Benji doesn’t like to draw attention to himself. For example, on the issue of “fro-touching,” rather than speak up and give his opinions like NP or Nick, he bounces back and forth between their opinions, even though he is at the center of this controversy. He prefers to make himself invisible and mumbles, especially to his father, which makes the father angry. This is in strong contrast to the image of himself that he imagined at the start of summer: cool, confident, popular Ben.

“My grandparents died before I was born and I didn’t know how to feel when people talked about them. I had this thing in my head where they sat me down and laid it all out, the way things work, how to move, what to be, but I’d never have that information now. Except the hard way.”

Benji has a brief discussion with Bobby’s grandfather, who encourages Benji to follow the traditions of the past, which triggers Benji’s feelings of being unprepared for life. He tries to act proper and respectful in front of his parents and their friends, refusing to betray any love of “street culture,” especially in front of his father, but at the same time, when he is alone with his friends, he goes along with them as they pretend to act like gangsters in setting up a BB gunfight. In some ways he is a typical adolescent, trying to figure out his identity among a confluence of many different types of forces. He feels cut off from the founding generation since his grandfather is dead, and he feels that loss keenly.

“‘Neon King Kong standin’ on my back, Can’t turn around, broke my sacadiliac.’ His nut sack. He’s saying everything’s so tough, it’s like getting kicked in the balls.”

Benji mishears the lyrics to the rap song “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, mishearing the lyric “broke my sacroiliac” as “broke my sacadiliac.” This misunderstanding gets passed on to his friend Bobby and then eventually NP, who is finally able to clear up the understanding when he questions a member of U.T.F.O. about the meaning of the song. This hilarious extended misunderstanding shows Benji’s fascination with words and getting the words just right but also shows Benji’s fumbling with words when he doesn’t quite understand something. He later says, “Mishearing song lyrics, making your specific travesty of the words, is the right of every human being” (260), showing his desire to take ownership of pop culture and reclaim it in his own way, even if it results in disastrous, humorous effect.

“It’s a safe bet the older white people, the middle-aged East End denizens, were not die-hard U.T.F.O. fans. They showed up because they’d heard that Bayside was the place to be that night. Refugees from the known and humdrum, the smothering day-to-day. I coulda bought a beer, but I didn’t want to push my luck, picturing the music cutting off and Klaxons sounding as the bartender discovered I’d made it past security Everything coming to a stop as they all looked at me, the utter opposite of what was going on now. No one looked at me. I was one of them on the dance floor and they were one of me. I jostled, was jostled in turn, collision as communication: I am here, we’re here together.”

It is rare for Benji to lose his sense of self-consciousness. He always feels that others are watching him and as a result, he feels anxious for being under the microscope. The intensity of the gaze goes both ways: Benji puts everyone and everything he encounters under the microscope as well, analyzing the world around him and categorizing them in Dungeon and Dragons style: “People and monsters can be broken down by their inner natures, with Good, Evil, and Neutral on one axis, and Lawful and Chaotic on the other” (241). Once he is on the dance floor, he loses this obsessive analytical need to judge the world and can feel one with all around him, no matter their age, race, or experience. When he finally does decide to label his experience, he says, “This is Good. No qualifier, chaotic or otherwise. Simply: Good” (263).

“This was my old house where all the good things still lived even though we had moved on. Everything as it was. Even the boy, the one who always seemed happy. He had to be here. This was where he lived. Haunting the place in his polyester pants and fucked-up Afro. Was the same bottle of hydrogen peroxide sitting in the medicine cabinet? The grisly white foam. He was always running around and no looking where he was going. It all bubble dup. I saw it clearly. I thought it had been the kiss that the song retrieved, but it was this place.”

Earlier in the day, Benji had been listening to a love song that triggered powerful nostalgia, although he doesn’t figure out the source of the feeling until he ends up at his old beach house, the Hempstead House, now owned by his aunt but originally built by his grandfather. Benji idealizes his childhood, imagining his summer memories of that house as a time of happiness and love.

“We were a family. This was the scene the song gifted to me. The radio played in the kitchen, the black transistor radio sitting on top of the green GE fridge. The man sang through static, ‘I know that I could make you love me too.’ That perfect day so long ago when we were all together. The beautiful afternoon before it went wrong.”

As Benji continues to reflect on his summer memories of his childhood, he imagines a scene where his whole family is sitting together, getting along, clearly loving each other. The father is grilling for another barbecue, but in juxtaposition to the poisoned atmosphere of Chapter 5’s barbecue, this scene is a loving scene of a family gathered together, appreciating each other’s company. Benji immediately undercuts the scene, saying that this memory never happened; he simply idealizes the past, aided by the sweet but corny lyrics of the love song and memories of The Cosby Show that he has carefully watched.