Page 61 - A Little Life: A Novel

observed that he’d never had trouble getting a cab in New York and maybe
people who complained about it were exaggerating. This was his junior
year, during his and JB’s first and last visit to the weekly Black Students’

Union meeting. JB’s eyes had practically engorged, so appalled and gleeful
was he, but when it was another guy, a self-righteous prick from Atlanta,
who informed Malcolm that he was, number one, barely black, number two,
an oreo, and number three, because of his white mother, unable to wholly
understand the challenges of being truly black, it had been JB who had
defended him—JB was always harassing him about his relative blackness,
but he didn’t like it when other people did it, and he certainly didn’t like it

when it was done in mixed company, which JB considered everyone except
Jude and Willem, or, more specifically, other black people.
Back in his parents’ house on Seventy-first Street (closer to Park), he
endured the nightly parental interrogation, shouted down from the second
floor (“Malcolm, is that you?” “Yes!” “Did you eat?” “Yes!” “Are you still
hungry?” “No!”), and trudged upstairs to his lair to review once again the

central quandaries of his life.
Although JB hadn’t been around to overhear that night’s exchange with
the taxicab driver, Malcolm’s guilt and self-hatred over it moved race to the
top of tonight’s list. Race had always been a challenge for Malcolm, but
their sophomore year, he had hit upon what he considered a brilliant cop-
out: he wasn’t black; he was post-black. (Postmodernism had entered
Malcolm’s frame of consciousness much later than everyone else’s, as he

tried to avoid taking literature classes in a sort of passive rebellion against
his mother.) Unfortunately, no one was convinced by this explanation, least
of all JB, whom Malcolm had begun to think of as not so much black but
pre-black, as if blackness, like nirvana, was an idealized state that he was
constantly striving to erupt into.
And anyway, JB had found yet another way to trump Malcolm, for just as

Malcolm was discovering postmodern identity, JB was discovering
performance art (the class he was in, Identity as Art: Performative
Transformations and the Contemporary Body, was favored by a certain kind
of mustachioed lesbian who terrified Malcolm but for some reason flocked
to JB). So moved was he by the work of Lee Lozano that for his midterm
project, he decided to perform an homage to her entitled Decide to Boycott
White People (After Lee Lozano), in which he stopped talking to all white

people. He semi-apologetically, but mostly proudly, explained his plan to