Saving the best punches for the final round: "What's Wrong with You? What's Wrong with Me?" by J. M. Holmes

Fiction writing "rules" are, of course, meant to be broken, but J.M. Holmes' "What's Wrong with You? What's Wrong with Me?" breaks at least three of them right off the bat:

• Starting a story off with dialogue usually doesn't work well
• Don't set a story in a bar
• Easy on the dialect

"What's Wrong" doesn't start in a bar, but it does start at someone's house where the four characters are all getting baked and drunk and talking about life. Most of the story takes place in dialogue rife with AAVE. This is extremely difficult to do well. The "story in a bar where people talk and say profound things about life while speaking a colorful patois" is just really hard to do in a fresh way.

So for the first half of the story, I was only half along for the ride. We follow four young black men as they hang out and get high. There's Rolls, the pseudo-enlightened peacemaker whose house most of the story takes place in. There's "Dub," short for "Double L," whose real name is Lazarus Livingston. His parents wanted him to be a football star, but he wasn't quite good enough. He's the shit-stirrer, the one who is trying to make trouble. There's Rye, who was a much better football player and who seems to have the most sense of anyone. And then there's the point-of-view character, Gio. He's a mixed-race kid who's back home from college and kicking it with the friends he grew up with. 

The main point of conversation is introduced bluntly with the first line of the story, as Dub asks Rye how many white women he's slept with. It's clear this isn't the first time this subject's been raised, and Dub knows that for some reason, it's a sensitive topic for Rye. Dub boasts about his own number and claims Rye's number is zero. Dub is clearly trying to get under Rye's skin and provoke him. The conversation gets tense a few times, and Rolls tries to keep the tension from escalating too much. 

Unable to get Rye to bite, Dub tries for Gio, or "G," instead. G has a white girlfriend at college, Madie. The crew has met Madie. They admire her joint-rolling skills. They like her. But Dub starts in with sexual innuendos about Madie, and G turns out to be a little easier to provoke than Rye was. G tries to hit Dub, but accidentally hits Rolls instead while Rolls is trying to get between the two and make peace. 

The story could have ended there, and I'd have already been rewarded for sticking with the parts that made me a little disinclined to keep going at the beginning. The peacemaker really does often end up being the one who gets socked in the face. But the story's got a much better punch lined up after that.

Rye follows G out of the house after the fight. They get some cheap food, which G eats while Rye does most of the talking. Rye's got a pretty big revelation. He's been with a white woman once. Just once. It was going okay, but then, as Rye says, "What had happened was..."

What had happened was the girl called him a nigger while they were having sex. While G is trying to absorb this information and reassure himself that his relationship with Madie isn't built on her daddy issues she's working out with him or her exoticizing his race, Rye reveals a little bit more about what happened:

"I loved it...it made me an animal..."

"She said it again: Fuck me like a nigger." 

He stared at the ground for a while. 

"I wanted her so bad," he said. "She tried to turn her face toward me and I just buried it deeper. I thought I was going to break her. It's like I couldn't stop. I shoved my fingers down her throat with the other hand and she closed her eyes. I wouldn't even let her do that. I raised her eyelid so she had to keep an eye open. I bit her jaw until I saw teeth marks." 

The four boys represent different ways of dealing with the fact of black male stereotypes, of figuring out how they see themselves in a country where they are constantly guessing how others see them. They have different coping mechanisms. Dub is comfortable using the way his otherness works to his advantage with girls looking to act out. He's happy playing the part if he gets what he wants. Rolls is trying to find a Buddhist renunciation and get out of the game altogether through half-baked philosophy and getting fully baked on weed. Rye, tragically, seems to both see how wrong it is to traffic in stereotypes about himself and yet is also unable to resist the temptation. Most of the emotional impact of the story comes from Rye's realization that not only is it possible to live down to the worst things people think about you, it can also feel really good. It's terrifying how good it can feel for Rye. 

G is the one who might have an out. Madie seems to care about him for who he is. When Rye tells him about what the girl said to him, he thinks about how Madie is different. "I wasn't on the auction block in front of her," he says. But then three lines later, he repeats it, slightly differently. "I told myself I wasn't on the auction block in front of her." The poison in the world is already poisoning his relationship with Madie. Maybe she's got good intentions, maybe she doesn't. The point is he'll never know for sure how she views him, no matter how pure her intentions to him are. 

An aside about white women

You can always find a white male willing to say that white men are singled out for criticism, but white women seem to have been taking it on the chin lately in public. The election in November brought out some comments that seemed a little questionable to my mind. Here's one of the tamer ones from Howard University scholar Greg Carr:

He's mostly tweeting there about questionable voter registration practices, but he goes out of his way to drive over white women. In his mind are November results like how 59% of white women voted for Ted Cruz, which tipped the scales in what otherwise would have been a crushing loss for Republicans in their own heartland. Carr's was one of the more restrained reactions I could show. One woman hoped white women would "choke on the white supremacist patriarchal cock." (For a great analysis of why it's wrong to blame white women for the few Democratic setbacks in November, as well as why it's counter-productive for Democrats, see this great article in The Atlantic.) 

Maybe I'm letting my emotions cloud my judgment here, since white women have raised me, married me, and gifted me with my kids, but I think white women are being treated unfairly. "What's Wrong" is aware of, and making use of, this trendy hatred of "Becky," the stereotypical "basic bitch" white girl. I don't think the story is doing it unfairly: clearly, the boys would be aware of these ideas about white women, and surely, the stereotype must have some analogues in the real world the boys would have met. But assuming Madie's intentions are pure, she's going to end up a victim of racial realities in America, too, because her relationship to G is already poisoned.

I don't really have an issue with the story playing on this critical view of white women. Clearly, it's a thing the boys would have to contend with. The story's not about how white women are hurt by stereotypes; it's about how young black men are hurt by them. And it's a very strong story about that subject, one with a helluva punch coming at the end. So it's fine the story doesn't look at the other reality going on here. But it is a reality. White women are sometimes the innocent victims of racially charged anger in America just like Rolls was.