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The Content of Our Soul
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11425 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1994 |
3,577 Words |
| Author
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Michael Marshall
Michael Marshall is executive editor of THE WORLD & I. |
Back in March 1991, Nathan McCall wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post. Titled "The Life I Escaped: Flashbacks to a Violent Past," it made riveting reading. It told how McCall, as a young man growing up in Portsmouth, Virginia, became enmeshed in the violence and crime of street life and finally went to prison for being the gunman in the armed robbery of a McDonald's. He described how he came within a whisker of pulling the trigger and shooting the store manager.
For McCall, prison was a watershed. Like Malcolm X, he used his time to reflect and change his life. After his release, he completed college and went into journalism; he now works as a reporter for the Washington Post. The article described the devastation that had visited the lives of so many of his peers, pondered how he escaped when they did not, and expressed his fears of a new generation more violent and alienated than his own.
The writing was that of a graphic report from a war zone. One could almost smell the burnt powder. Yet there was a sense of uplift amid the horror. McCall had, after all, made his break from the street life of his youth. If he could, why couldn't others?
It was with a sense of expectation, therefore, that I read McCall's autobiography, Makes Me Wanna Holler. It was different from what I expected. The same smell of burnt powder is present, only here it is so overpowering at times that the reader nearly chokes. From the opening chapter, where McCall and his homeboys, at fourteen or fifteen, chase down and kick senseless an older teenager for having the audacity to be a white riding his bike through their neighborhood, the book's descriptions of violence are so raw they require effort to digest. Beating up white boys is far from the worst of it.
Make no mistake, though. This is not a criticism. Anyone concerned with the problems of race, of violent crime, of America's inner cities will have to come to terms with this book. It is written with courage and offers no easy answers. There is a lot here that does not reflect well on the young McCall, and it must have been wrenching to put some of it down. Perhaps there are events he suppressed, but the degree of honesty about incidents that must be difficult for him to live with is remarkable by any standard of autobiographical writing.
This quality in the book will ensure it a great deal of attention and controversy. I am certain we shall hear it hailed as "the authentic voice of the black
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