Washington -- When Nathan McCall writes about the gang violence in American cities, he isn't just another journalist crunching statistics and venturing out for the occasional homeboy-in-the-street interview. He has strutted down such streets himself, armed and angry, and soon enough incarcerated.
It's the brutal experience of someone who has been there that fuels his autobiographical book "Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America," recently published by Random House. In it, this 39-year-old Washington Post reporter talks about racial tension in this country by way of his own life story.
Mr. McCall's unflinching book has been touted by the literary likes of historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. and author Claude Brown, whose "Manchild in the Promised Land" it often resembles. Beyond the book world, Columbia Pictures has bought the movie rights for director John Singleton ("Boyz 'N' the Hood").
The early chapters of Mr. McCall's book immediately debunk the notion that his youthful criminal career was the result of a broken home. He was raised by his mother and stepfather in a working-class neighborhood in Portsmouth, Va. At the time of his worst criminal spree, he was in college.
Yet, even with such a support network, he did everything from steal an ice cream truck to shoot a man in the chest at point-blank range.
Nathan McCall was 20 years old when an armed robbery of a McDonald's landed him a 12-year prison sentence. He served three years of that sentence, and in the intervening years has remade his life so completely that he sometimes wonders if his book isn't about two different people.
As he states in the book: "Sometimes, when I sit back and think about the crazy things the fellas and I did and remember the hate and violence that we unleashed, it's hard to believe I was once part of all that -- I feel so removed from it now that I've left the streets. Yet when I consider white America and the way it's treated blacks, our random rage in the old days makes perfect sense to me. Looking back, it's easy to understand how it all got started."
As the leanly built Mr. McCall discusses his book during an interview in a Washington restaurant, his voice is so low and calm one has to lean forward to catch some of his words. "Sometimes I wrote things and then went back and read them a couple days later as if reading something about another person," says Mr. McCall, who lives in Mitchellville, in Prince George's County. "I feel so far removed from that in terms of how I live now and how I respond to things. I'm still quick to anger, but I don't respond the same way now."
Although Mr. McCall forthrightly condemns much of what he did in earlier days, he is no less blunt in describing the racism that has kept so many young black men unemployed, bitter and ready to lash out. He still strongly identifies with what they're up against and feels that white Americans and black Americans live in separate cultures and that blacks who attempt to assimilate do so at the risk of their cultural identity.
"There are times when I feel very much in touch with a brother I'll be talking to on the street," he says. "We're talking slang, and then I'm more comfortable with that than I am with the white man's dream. I'm still doing a balancing act in two worlds, and I still don't feel completely comfortable. There are a lot of black people who are trying to cross over to the white man's dream and assimilate to such an extent they almost nullify what's real for them.
"Psychologically, it's not healthy for people trying to handle that juggling act. They try to deny they're different than anyone else. We are different -- and that's OK. But they don't feel it's OK. I see that kind of denial most often from the black conservatives," he continues, citing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as an example. "It's so apparent they hate themselves and try as hard as possible to deny their own reality in the hopes they'll be accepted by someone else. It's the black conservatives who say race is no longer a major factor in our lives."
Nathan McCall's viewpoint was influenced by the reading he did while working in the prison library. Books such as Richard Wright's "Native Son" and Malcolm X's autobiography brought him to understand the larger social forces at play.
Upon his release in February 1978, he went back to school and graduated from Norfolk State University. Having kept a journal in prison and studied journalism in college, he got a job at the Virginian Pilot-Ledger Star and later the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Much of the second half of his book deals with the racism he feels minority journalists encounter in newsrooms.
"Nathan McCall just impressed himself on me as a born leader," recalls Bill Kovach, editor of the Journal-Constitution from 1986 to 1988 and now curator of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Nieman Foundation. Mr. Kovach promoted him to the position of head of the Atlanta newspaper's city-hall bureau; he was not bothered when Mr. McCall confessed his criminal record only after many months on the job.
"By the time I found out about [his time in prison], it was irrelevant," Mr. Kovach says simply. "He'd taken control of his life, so I never had any second thoughts about him as a substantial person and . . . journalist."
However, Mr. Kovach disagrees with Mr. McCall's description of racial friction in the newsroom: "I don't think the relationship of black and white [staff members] was as polarized as Nathan felt. I thought he was supersensitive to it. Still, I can understand intellectually the concern of any black reporter in a newsroom where they are a minority in a majority community" of journalists.
Mr. McCall joined the Washington Post as a reporter in 1989, covering city hall at a time when the mayor, Marion Barry, provided no shortage of stories to write. The transition from filing daily stories to taking a two-year sabbatical to write his book was sparked by an essay he wrote for the Post in 1991, in which he noted: "Most of the guys I hung out with are in prison, dead, drug zombies or nickel-and-dime street hustlers. Some are racing full-throttle toward self-destruction."
His book is obviously an attempt to understand that self-destruction and to try to save today's youngsters. Among the youth in this divorced man's thoughts are his 20-year-old son, Monroe, who is a student at Hampton University. Mr. McCall also has a son, Ian, 10, and a daughter, Maya, 8, who live with their mother in Atlanta.
Speaking of how young black men verge on being an "endangered species" in our violent society, Mr. McCall says with quiet force that "I tried to write about my life as a microcosm of the psychic odyssey of so many young black men. I wanted to put myself through the various stages of my life again and let them [black males] know that despite all the crazy things I did I've always been a human being.
"The biggest concern I see now is that young black males are being dehumanized in a way that enables people to feel comfortable about proposing things like the three-strikes-and-you're-out [legislation for repeat offenders]. . . . There are so many negative [media] images of the black man as monster and beast, lurking in the shadows and waiting to steal your car and rape your wife. If somebody tells you you're like that, eventually it'll sink in and you'll start to think of yourself as a despicable thing."
Asked whether real progress has been made in racial relations in this country so many decades into the civil rights movement, Mr. McCall says, "In terms of our condition as a people, the jury is still out. Sometimes I feel we're better off, and sometimes I feel we're worse off."
He explains that in his youth, poor and middle-class blacks would live on the same street. A support network of churches, schools and other institutions also provided healthy examples for youngsters.
"As a kid, you could see people working and raising families. Looking around your immediate environment, you could see [positive] things being reinforced. That's no longer the case," he says. He adds that many children today live "in public housing projects that are so vast that all the kids ever see is hopelessness and frustration and failure. At times like that, I feel like we're walking backwards."
It all makes Nathan McCall wanna holler.
Nathan McCall will be appearing at a book-signing at Waldenbooks in White Marsh Mall Saturday from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m.
'LIKE OIL AND WATER': AN EXCERPT
"Superfly" influenced the style, thinking, and choices that a lot of young black men began making around that time [1972]. I know it deeply affected me. I came out of that movie more convinced than ever that the white man and I were like oil and water. We didn't mix. My partner, Shell Shock, was on the same wavelength. He started thinking that maybe there was a future in dealing drugs. A few weeks after we saw the movie, we were sitting around at his place getting wasted when Shell Shock outlined his game plan, which was essentially a scaled-down version of the plan Priest had devised in the movie. "I know I can do it, man. Most of the white folks that got money did something illegal to get it. Look at how the Kennedys got started. They bootlegged liquor during the Depression, then went legit. Now they're millionaires! All I gotta do is make enough money to start my own business, then I can quit the drug game."
It was shortsighted, far-fetched fantasy for sure. But to our way of thinking, it was no more far-fetched than the civil rights notion that white people would welcome us into their system with open arms if we begged and prayed and marched enough.
-- From "Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America," by Nathan McCall (Random House).