Tyler Patton was black, or African-American, or a nigger, or what have you. He did not know when he ceased to be black, but when they spoke of him now, they used the past tense and not only in regards to his ethnicity. Yes, he was black, but he also was an honor student, he was on the track and field team, he was a bassist, he was alive. Supposedly, all of those aspects of his character ceased to be. He was no longer black; he simply was.
Of course, he never considered himself black anyway—not in the sense that society considered one black. For one, he had never set foot in a ghetto, and all black men, all black men of merit, hailed from the ghetto. Eazy E, the man he had idealized since he had been capable of such a fixation, came from the ghetto. Died there, too. But Tyler's mother begat her son in a Presbyterian hospital, in close proximity to at least two coffee shops where seldom an NWA track was heard. Tell them where you’re from, Tyler:
“Straight out of Plano.”
A suburb of Dallas … doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it? He possessed no gold teeth though he had had a couple of fillings, he did not drive a Cadillac, he did not own rims for his non-existent Cadillac, he did not play nor did he enjoy watching basketball, he had no aspirations to rise from rags to riches, he believed most fried chicken was too greasy, and he had never met a watermelon he enjoyed. Now, he did not simplify those qualities into a prototypical black man. He would not even consider that portrayal a stereotypical black man, but somewhere in his sub-conscious, he figured he should have been that person, should have crafted a more suave and seventies-soul-brother persona. In his thoughts he sounded smooth, hearing the voice of a middle aged Barry White rather than the scrawny teenager who actually spoke and earnestly believing that smoothness to accurately speak on behalf of his character, but that man--that negro Casanova--existed only in his father. He was not his father, a man as black as society defined black, and now, and not only because of the condition of his deadness, he would never be his father. With surgery, he could have been his mother, and without it, he still possessed the nerdy suburban mentality she held. However, as much love as he had for his mother, he did not want to be that person. He wanted the “Black Power,” television negro, character—the black men who made records, made money, impressed women.
Yet he was no better or worse for not being that person. And now, he was nothing at all. He simply was.
