parents moved from Florida to Cavalier Manor, an
African-American middle-class neighborhood in
Portsmouth, Virginia. This was the family’s first real
house, a symbol of their fulfillment of the Ameri-
can dream. Surrounded by his extended family,
which included his grandmother, McCall and his
brothers lived relatively normal lives as mischie-
vous boys who played hooky from their Presbyte-
rian Sunday school, played cowboys and Indians,
held paper routes, and went skinny-dipping in
Crystal Lake. Security and community extended
beyond the walls of the family home, for Cavalier
Manor was a neighborhood filled with surrogate
parents, “people who would punish you like your
mama and daddy if they caught you doing wrong.”
McCall adds, “School was also part of that surro-
gate system.... Those teachers spanked us like we
were their own when we acted up in class” (8).
McCall experienced a damaging rite of passage
into southern social stratification when his stepfa-
ther took him to work with him for the first time
in Sterling Point, “the most affluent neighborhood
in Portsmouth,” located on the other side of the
bridge. Here, in this “ghostly antiseptic place,” Mc-
Call sees only near-invisible black domestic work-
ers and witnesses his stepfather’s degradation, not
only by his wealthy clients, who address him by his
first name (Bonnie, a name not even Nate’s mother
used), but also by their disrespectful children, who
failed to acknowledge his presence as an adult, the
way southern black children are taught to do. Em-
barrassed by his stepfather’s obsequious behavior,
McCall rejects outright this prescribed legacy. He
would not be like the “downtrodden sharecrop-
pers and field slaves [he’d] seen in books” (17).
McCall’s association of his stepfather’s behavior
with subjugation and slavery recalls the impetus
that drove both FREDERICK DOUGLASS and Richard
Wright to take flight.
In 1966, the first year Virginia integrated its
public schools, McCall was in the sixth grade; he
was transferred to Alford J. Mapp, “a white school
across town,” where he was devalued by both stu-
dents and teachers. A year later, he was transferred
to W. E. Waters Middle School, a predominantly
black school, which provided not only a sanctuary
for the psychologically damaged youth but above
all membership in his age group, a “set” (gang) that
eventually provided him with “the standard for
manliness,” including styling or dressing, putting
waves in his hair, dancing, and strutting or pimp-
ing, which provided the identity that shaped his
youth (27). Membership in this gang, he explains,
“was a confidence booster, a steady support for my
fragile self-esteem. Alone I was afraid of the world
and insecure. But I felt cockier and surer of myself
when hanging with my boys” (33).
McCall’s effort to overcome his fears, define his
own masculinity (including through the sexual
abuse of black women), and gain respect as a black
man through gang criminal activities (breaking
and entering and armed robbery) eventually led
him, at age 20, to prison for robbing a McDonald’s
restaurant. Ironically, he had served only 30 days
in jail previously for shooting and nearly killing
another black man. Prison was a wake-up call
for McCall. After reading Malcolm X’s works and
Wright’s NATIVE SON and abandoning Christian-
ity and embracing Islam while in prison, McCall
returned rehabilitated to society when he was re-
leased early for good behavior after serving three
years. Like Douglass, Wright, and Malcolm X,
McCall found in self-education a meaningful av-
enue to the quality of life he desired. Returning to
Norfolk State University, he completed a degree
in journalism and later found work with several
major newspapers, including the Virginia Pilot-
Ledger Star, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and
The Washington Post.
Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in
America “shows that there are no simple explana-
tions or pat solutions to the problems of racism
and street violence. It answers questions only about
its author, who wonders ‘I was not special. How
did I endure when so many others were crushed’ ”
(Gadler, 45). The book was a New York Times best
seller and was named Blackboard Book of the Year
(1995). McCall published a collection of personal
essays, What’s Going On, in 1997. In 1998 he joined
the journalism faculty at Emory University, where
he also taught classes in creative writing and Afri-
can-American studies.342 McCall, Nathan