I wrote this while I was at Columbia’s grad school for creative writing after a former student named Tom Beller asked me to contribute to his collection of essays about being under 30. The piece ended up in the Best American Essays of 1999.
What’s Inside You, Brother?
A Memoir of Fighting
Columbia University, March 1998
By Touré
“You ache with the need to convince yourself
that you do exist in the real world,
that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish,
and you strike out with your fists,
you curse and you swear
to make them recognize you.”
—from Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
From outside the circle of spandexed actresses jumping rope, their ponytails bouncing politely, Body & Soul appears to be a boxing gym rated G. But push through the circle, past the portly, middle-age lawyers slugging through leg lunges and past the dumpy jewelry designers, wearing rouge, giggling as they slap at the speed bag. Keep pushing into the heart of the circle, toward the sound of taut leather pap-papping against bone, toward the odor of violence, and, as often as not, you’ll find two men sparring, their fists stuffed into blue or red or black Everlast gloves, T-shirts matted down by hot perspiration, heavy breaths shushed through mouthpieces, moving quick and staccato and with tangible tinges of fear as they bob and weave and flick and fake, searching for a taste of another man’s blood.
Sometimes Touré will be in the heart of the circle, maybe sparring with Jack, hands up, headgear tight, lungs heavy, ribs stinging after Jack backs him into a corner and slices a sharp left uppercut through Touré’s elbows into the soft, very top section of his stomach. Then, for Touré, time stops. He loses control of his body, feels briefly suspended in air, his thoughts seemingly hollered to him from far away. Life is never faster than in the ring, except when you’re reeling from a razing punch. Then, life is never slower. Sometimes Touré will be in the heart of the circle sparring, but I don’t know why: he’s not very good.
I’ve known Touré a long, long time—you could say we grew up together. He’s just over five feet ten inches and about one hundred sixty pounds. That’s one inch taller and a few pounds lighter than the legendary middleweight Marvelous Marvin Hagler. Touré, however, has neither long arms to throw punches from a distance, which minimizes vulnerability, nor massive strength to chop a man down with a few shots. He has the stamina to stay fresh through five and occasionally six rounds, yet after four years of boxing, he still lacks the weapons to put a boxer in real danger, and that puts him in danger. Being a lousy fighter is far different from sucking at, say, tennis. So, if he’s not good, why does he continue climbing in the ring? I went to the gym to find out.
“Three men walkin down the deck of a luxury liner,” says Carlos, the owner of Body & Soul. He is a yellow-skinned Black man and a chiseled Atlas who always gives his clients good boxing advice and a good laugh. “Italian guy, Jewish guy, Black guy.” He begins giggling. “Italian guy pulls out a long cigar,” he says and begins walking stiff and tough like Rocky. “He whips out his lighter, lights the cigar, puts it in his pocket, and keeps walking. Jewish guy wants to be as big as him, so he takes out a slightly longer cigar, grabs out his matchbook, and strikes the match on the book. It won’t light.”
“Oy vay!” a Jewish woman interjects dramatically.
“So the Jewish guy strikes the match on the deck. It lights. He puts the match in the ashtray and keeps steppin. Now the Black guy...”
“Aww shit,” you say.
“...the Black guy want to be as big as them—you know how niggas are,” he says, and everyone cracks up. “So he takes out the longest cigar and a match and goes to strike it on the matchbook. Won’t light. Tries it on the deck. No dice. So finally he strikes it on the seat of his pants. The match lights! He lights the cigar, tosses the match overboard. But when the match go overboard, the luxury liner is passing an oil slick. The match hits the oil and the boat blows up.” He pauses and smiles like the Kool-Aid man. “What’s the moral of the story?”
Everyone grins expectantly.
“If a nigga scratch his ass he’ll set the world on fire!”
You and Carlos laugh hard, doubling over together.
Nigga scratch his ass he’ll set the world on fire, you say to yourself. How ridiculous. More of the silly, Black chauvinist—negrovinist?—joking that we waste time with instead of thinking of ways to get ahead. Black is more often lit on fire by the world! How stupid to think that by doing something as crude as scratching your ass you could grab the world’s attention, shake it up, maybe even Blacken it. That just by being your Black self, you could make the world ours.
As Carlos’s audience for the joke disperses he pulls you close to put on your headgear the same way your parents once pulled you close to zip up your snowsuit. Your hands stuffed into large gloves in preparation for combat, you are immobilized, unable to do anything for yourself—not hold a cup of water, not scratch your ass—anything but throw punches. Carlos squeezes the thick, leather pillow past your temples, down around your ears, and pulls tight the laces under your chin. The padding bites down on your forehead, your temples, your cheeks. You look into the mirror. Your head and face are buried so deeply in padding, you can’t tell yourself apart from another head wrapped up in headgear. You can’t recognize your face.
The buzzer rings, launching the three-minute round, and you turn to the heavy bag, a large sack of leather and padding that hangs from the ceiling like a giant kielbasa. You approach the bag as you would another fighter, working your rhythms and combinations and strength, sinking in your hooks and jabs and crosses. You begin hitting slowly, paying close attention to each stinging shot, moving in slow, sharp rhythms like an old Leadbelly guitar-and-harmonica blues, each punch slapping the bag and sounding like a dog-eared, mud-splattered, ripped-apart boot stomping the floorboards of a little Alabama juke joint where they chased away the blues with the blues, sung in a key so deep whites thought they could hear it, but Negroes knew only they could. Because slaying the blues was a never-ending gig halted only for one thing, and that was radio dispatches of a Joe Louis bout. That cured the blues in a hurry, hearing the Brown Bomber slaying one or another white boy by fighting so slowly he looked like sepia-toned stop motion, his body stiff and slow like a cobra, hypnotizing his man, until the precise moment for the perfect punch. Then, lightning: a left-right would explode from Louis, and quick as a thunderclap his man would be sprawled on the ground below him, that’s right, an Italian or a German with his spine on the canvas as thousands listened on, Louis having done what Negroes dreamed of doing but hardly dared think. Then Louis, the grandson of Booker T. Washington, the grandfather of Colin Powell, humbly retreated to his corner, his face wooden and emotionless, his aura as unthreatening as only the highest of the high-yellows could manage.
So you go on hitting the bag and talking to yourself in body English, the dialect of Joe Louis, talking with a near Tommish lilt as you slink slowly around the bag, but not quite Tommish because after a few racially quiet sentences you slash a few, quick, deadly words and leave your opponent counting the sheep on the ceiling. You speak to yourself in the most necessary Black English in America, that of the humble assimilationist, and you move around the bag, trying to hypnotize your opponent, then lashing two, three rocket shots at him, and imagine yourself, like the Brown Bomber, lighting the world on fire, quietly.
The bell ring-ring-rings. The round is over. Fighters wander from their bags over toward Carlos, in the center of the room. Jack, a gruesome-looking, thirty year-old white dentist, bumps into you, feigning an accident. “Touré! I didn’t even see you!” he lies with a laugh. “I can’t recognize you without my jab in your face.”
People crack up. During breaks the fighting doesn’t stop, it just turns oral. A crude variant on the verbal fisticuffs called the dozens takes its place. But instead of attacking your poverty, or your mama, it’s your boxing or your looks. The one who makes everyone laugh loudest wins. And as with the dozens, sometimes it hurts. But when it’s done by your own, to strengthen you for the onslaught from without, you know that a beat down is really a build up and you just keep on. “What’s the point in us fighting?” you ask, looking at Jack’s flattened nose and honeycombed skin. “That face cain’t get ruined no worse.” More laughs. This round is a tie.
The bell comes again and you head back to the heavy bag for three minutes more of fervor. You attack the bag savagely now, punching harder with all of the strength in your arms and all the evil in your hands, making the bag suck hard and send back flat, dull beats like the cold, thick drumbeats of raw, gutbucket southern soul, maybe Otis Redding, and now you are speaking Sonny Liston.
This is the body English of the back alley, the backroom, the back corner of the prison’s back cell, where Liston, serious criminal, Mob enforcer, learned to box and became a straight-ahead, raw and rugged, black as blue, bruiser nigga. The grandson of Nat Turner, the grandfather of Mike Tyson. The scion and hero of every bully who ever lived. This is not the English of the street, no, too much bustling energy and zooming hustler’s pace, no, this is the English of the street corner. Home of the long-faced, too silent, black-black nigguhs who work only at night, who don’t read Ebony, who have a look that could make death turn around. Liston knocked his man out and strolled over to a neutral corner with a glower that took the whole stadium right back to some alley that ain’t seen the sun in decades, off some long-forgotten street at the end of the world. You’re slamming your hands into the bag, but you’re in that same alley, scrapping as you’re sidestepping ancient garbage and streams of green water and body parts without bodies, as a single long-broken street lamp looks on, saying nothing. Liston lit the world on fire as the most hated man on the planet, and now here you come fighting ugly, banging the bag, banging like a ram, talking that crude, foul, dirty Listonese.
“Hey, Touré!” Jack screams out from across the gym as the buzzer ending the second round begins to sound. “What’s goin on inside that voodoo-do up on your head?”
The gym goes into hysterics. “Get out my face,” you shoot back, “you melanin-challenged mothafucka.” People double over. This round to you.
Before the third round starts, you stop moving long enough to get your heart back and your head together. This round you’re going to put it all together. When the bell sounds you’re a flurry of movement and flow, dancing out, then stepping in, weaving your head through the air and sliding in to land two, three, four, five quick punches and then out, dancing and bobbing, then three, four, five more quick shots to the bag on which you play a hot staccato tempo borrowed from high-pace jazz, from the sheets of sound of Coltrane. And now you’re talking Muhammad Ali, the smooth-flowing, fan-dazzling, rhythm poet, the melding of Louis Armstrong and Malcolm X and Michael Jackson and the zip-bam-boom, the speed, swagger, swish, rope-a-dope, jungle rumbler, Manila thriller, who turned the ring into an artist’s studio, the canvas his own beautiful body.
Now, in front of the bag is a true African-American, a cool synthesis, not merely assimilating, not merely rebelling, but blending like jazz, melding what is gorgeous and grotesque about Africa and America. It’s a body English that’s the high-tech version of that spoken by Brer Rabbit, the Negro folktale trickster and blues-trained hero whose liquid mind and body could find a way past any so-called insurmountable force on any so-rumored impossible mission without the force even knowin he been there and gone. It’s a body English filled with signifying, which means you say bad and mean good or you say bad and mean bad. And either way everyone who’s supposed to know always know and know without anyone having to explain because everyone who’s supposed to know know about signifying even if they don’t know the word.
But you know all that, so you fire through the round in constant, unstoppable motion, lighting the entire universe on glorious, ecstatic, religious-fervor fire with your Aliese, and of Black, and of beauty. And then, as punches rain from deep within your heart onto the bag you see that Carlos was right, a Black man can light the world on fire, wake it up, change it up, Blacken it up, by something as crude and simple and natural as scratching his ass, that is, simply by being himself.
The round ends and Jack comes rushing over. You two are about to spar a few rounds, and he is teasing you now with a half-speed flurry of pantomimed jabs and hooks. Everyone looks on. “He’s attacking me!” you call out in mock horror. “I sense a bias crime! Is there a lawyer in the house?” Again, laughter carries the day, but then the laughter carries you back, back to the laughter of the playground, back to the beginning of your fight career.
On the playground you sat alone, the only Black face as far as you could see on the playground of that century-and-a-half-old New England prep school. Matthew came over. He never liked you. He was brown-skinned with curly black hair, and Mom always whispered that he had to be part Black, but he never claimed it, never even admitted to being adopted. He saw you sitting alone in the playground and said, “Hey, Touré, why don’t you come over and play?” You don’t mean it. “If you get dirty, no one will know!” Then he began to laugh.
You sprang at him in a frenzy, flinging tiny fists into his face, one after another without aim or direction, punch after punch flowing overhand and sloppy at his head and face and shoulders. Tears flying as easily as arms, finding room on your cheeks amid the hot sweat breaking into the brisk New England cold, you didn’t feel his tiny fists jolting back at you, didn’t hear the delighted screams of other children—Fight! Fight!—didn’t hear the teacher Miss Farrah running to break it up after a few seconds that seemed like a year spent roaring at each other with tiny fists. You weren’t even certain who you were as you rolled about in a gale of blows until you crawled inside yourself and found a serenity inside your embattled self, a peace beneath your warring skin, because you were fighting back, and that made you certain that you could light the world on fire because there was a fire lit inside of you.
The Body & Soul buzzer screamed. Touré snapped back to attention as Jack came toward him, beginning their first round of sparring. Right away, Jack stepped close and stung Touré with a left jab in his nose, then another and another. Touré backed up and slipped a jab that landed on Jack’s nose, pushing his head back sharply, then another jab that Jack blocked. Touré was much better fighting from the outside than the inside. The outside is when there’s a few feet between fighters. They stand a polite distance away from each other, moving on their toes, occasionally jabbing or blocking and always looking for openings. When the boxers are outside, relatively speaking, there’s a gentlemanly calm and leisurely pace about the fight. Inside, the fighters are just inches away from each other and it’s point-blank range for both men, and it’s at once sexy and dangerous. Over and again Touré tried to get inside, and finally Jack made him pay for coming into the wrong neighborhood. Touré stepped close to Jack and tried a quick left hook. Then a hard right uppercut caught Touré in the ribs. Jack saw him coming and pulled his trigger faster.
In the locker room of Body & Soul I caught up with Touré. Since we’ve known each other so long I felt I could be completely honest. I was wrong.
“Why do you keep boxing?”
“I can’t stop,” he said without looking up.
“You mean, you won’t stop.”
“No. I can’t. I love it.”
“You get in the ring and get knocked down. Aren’t you worried about...”
“Yo man, a punch in the face ain’t but a thing.”
“Are you trying to take physical punishment to absolve your middle-class-based guilt and be literally banged into the gang of proletariat Blacks who live to give and take lumps every day and...”
Then he lunged at me. He swung at me with force and fury and I fell hard on the ground. I saw my blood then, and for a fleeting second I felt a jolt of adrenaline. I was hot with anger and humiliation, but I was also not at all self-conscious, and still wonderfully aware, as wide open as the sky. I was in pain and ecstasy. And from somewhere deep inside I laughed loud and hard.
He stood over me and roared down, “I don’t need to hear yo shit, man. I’ve sparred a few times. I beat myself up all the time.” He paused, then spoke with a soft intensity. “See, before my moms sent me off to first grade she said, ‘You have to be twice as good as those little white kids.’ And that shit was real. But not here. In that ring all you got is two gloves and your head. That’s a real... what’s the word...”
“Meritocracy?”
“Boxocracy? Fightocracy? Whatever. I can do whatever I want and be whoever I want to be. All fighters live until the day they die. That’s not a thing all men can say. But while he’s alive, a fighter lives.”
Then, I looked away and my mind floated back and I saw myself in college, junior year, at a party. As things broke up, a group of juniors stood talking, fifteen or so others within easy earshot. A small argument began, quickly turned hot. Then, finally, The Whisper was stated—The Whisper that had begun my freshman year when I arrived on campus and, after a decade-plus in a white prep school, didn’t join the Black community but pledged a white fraternity and vacationed with white boys and dated white girls. I was branded a traitor then, a Black Judas, and The Whisper started, followed me through sophomore year, when I consciously and conspicuously turned away from my white friends to party and protest with Black students. The Whisper chased me into junior year when I moved into the Black house became a campus political figure. And that night, at that party, as things broke up, The Whisper stepped from the shadows. “Touré, you ain’t Black.”
And I said nothing. I stood in the middle of a circle of my Black classmates and heard the silence screaming in my ears and saw my chance to fight back against The Whisper, and said nothing. I just turned slowly and walked away. I went to bed and promised myself to never tell the story of that night, not even to myself. I locked the memory away, closed my eyes. But the memory seeped out and kept me awake. And worse than the public humiliation was my non-answer: I had taken the knockdown sitting down.
The memory was obsessively replayed for me again and again as I crossed the quad, ate lunch, sat bored in class, furtively took sex, sometimes adding something I should have done—a witty retort, a tough reply, a physical attack—sometimes not. And it germinated in me and festered and burned and with time turned inventively malignant, burning him anew each time, a tumor inside his personal history, throbbing, reaching out around the corners of my mind, grabbing toward my self-image, threatening my internal balance. Then, realizing the power of my conscience, my sense of regret, the fire inside me began burning hotter.
“No matter what,” Touré said, looking directly at me, “I’ve got to fight, always fight, even in the face of sure defeat, because no one can hurt me as badly as I can.”
I knew exactly what he meant. And he bent down and helped me up.