Between Two Worlds

By Jack E. White

Ever since Frederick Douglass forged the story of his escape from slavery into a powerful abolitionist message, black writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright and Malcolm X have wielded their autobiographies like emancipating swords. Now that weapon has been taken up by two black journalists, Nathan McCall and Brent Staples, each of whom provides a soul- searing account of his uneasy journey from the segregated world of blacks to the token-integrated fringe of the white world.

Together, these life stories provide an unsettling account of the human consequences of an American tragedy: the widening division between blacks and whites during the turbulent aftermath of the civil rights movement. Their most disturbing message is that the psychological shell shock that afflicts much of the black community is not caused by white malevolence. Rather, it is a product of social distance itself, the gap not only between whites and blacks but also between blacks who have carved out a place for themselves and those who have given up in frustration. When strangers meet across this valley of ignorance, the result is mutual incomprehension.

McCall's Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America (Random House; $23) and Staples' Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White (Pantheon; $23) offer a horrifying catalog of the wasted lives and thwarted talents, misdirected rage and pitiful self-hatred that characterize the black urban underclass, from which both authors escaped. McCall, 39, participated in petty crime and savage violence; Staples, 42, lost a brother to the same plagues. Both went on to successful newspaper careers (McCall as a Washington Post reporter and Staples as an editorial writer for the New York Times). And despite their success, neither writer has made peace with either the black America he left behind or the white America in which he finds himself today.

McCall's transformation from hoodlum to newspaperman picks up where Malcolm X's story left off, charting the ambiguous destiny of the young men who came of age just as the black community split between a rapidly assimilating middle class and the increasingly isolated ghetto poor. A promising student in Portsmouth, Virginia, McCall had a hardworking, upright mother and stepfather. Yet he joined other teenagers in senseless shootings, stickups and brutal gang rapes, known as "pulling trains." At 19 he was convicted of robbing a fast- food joint and sentenced to 12 years in prison. For him as for Malcolm, jail meant salvation. Exposed to books and the wisdom of older inmates, he was paroled after three years, completed college and began making his difficult way into the white mainstream.

In one wrenching passage, McCall describes trying to apologize to a woman at college whom he once helped gang-rape: "I wanted to let her know that I was struggling to break from my past, too, and I wanted to encourage her to keep trying. But her expression suggested that I should say no more. It seemed that my presence brought out her shame. So I moved on." Later, after landing his first newspaper job, McCall removed articles about his own crimes from the clip files. Years passed before he felt confident enough to stop concealing his prison record from prospective employers. But even today, he writes, "at times I feel suspended in a kind of netherworld, belonging fully neither to the streets nor to the establishment."

Staples, whose family migrated from Virginia to the declining industrial city of Chester, Pennsylvania, was a comparative straight arrow. He managed to survive poverty, a deep estrangement from his disruptive family and small acts of cruelty from white neighbors without getting into serious trouble. He then went on to college and graduate work at the University of Chicago.

It was there that he learned the power of racial stereotypes. Tall and dark complexioned, Staples noticed he inspired fear in whites when he approached on the sidewalk. At first he sought to reassure them by whistling Vivaldi. Then he found malicious glee in frightening them in a game he called "scatter the pigeons." One night he hid in the shadows, then sprang in front of a white couple: "The two of them stood frozen as I bore down on them. I felt a surge of power: these people were mine . . . If I had been younger, with less to lose, I'd have robbed them." Instead Staples shouted good evening and strolled away with a laugh. There are few better examples in literature of the contained fury toward whites that grips even the most outwardly docile black man.

What sets these books apart from similar works by less talented writers is their refusal to oversimplify or offer easy prescriptions for the underclass dilemma. As McCall acknowledges, "My background and those of my running partners don't fit all the convenient theories, and the problems among us are more complex than something we can throw jobs, social programs or more policemen at." That maddening complexity, these two powerful books make clear, keeps it nearly as difficult for young blacks to free themselves from bondage today as it was in Douglass's time.