E-mail a friendNathan McCall
airdate December 7, 2007
Nathan McCall's best-selling memoir, Makes Me Wanna Holler, told of his journey from the streets to prison to the newsroom of a mainstream publication and established him as a prominent voice on social and racial issues. He's worked for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Virginian Pilot-Ledger Star and The Washington Post and lectured at Atlanta's Emory University. He holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Virginia's Norfolk State University. Them is McCall's recently released debut novel.
Author discusses how to get traction on a real conversation about Black men in America. (1:05)
Nathan McCall
Tavis: Nathan McCall is an acclaimed writer whose book, "Makes Me Wanna Holler," became a "New York Times" bestseller back in 1994. He now teaches in the African American Studies Department at Emory University. His latest book is, in fact, his first novel. The book is called "Them." He is receiving some terrific reviews and I am honored to have Professor McCall on the program. How you doing, Nathan?
Nathan McCall: Fine, fine. It's good to be here.
Tavis: You doing all right?
McCall: Yes.
Tavis: Good to see you. I want to go back first before I come to "Them," back to "Makes Me Wanna Holler." That book came out and hit "The New York Times" and everybody else's bestseller list and just kicked up a huge conversation in America in 1994 about the plight of Black men and the conversation kind of died off.
I don't know if you've noticed, but of late - I say of late, over the last year or so - that conversation has resurfaced again, indeed at your old newspaper, "The Washington Post," the big series they did on Black men. "The New York Times" did a piece on it, a big conference at University of Pennsylvania.
So everybody's talking again about the plight of Black men. What happened between 1994 and whatever is happening of late to bring this conversation back to the fore, if you read it the same way as I do, which you don't have to.
McCall: Yeah, I don't know that there's any one thing that has happened except that the problems that existed then have not been addressed to this day. You know, we keep revisiting it, so quite often people want to talk about, you know, what's going on with Black men, but it doesn't reach the public policy level.
Quite often, you know, we talk about it among us. Sometimes politicians talk about it, but it's not become a part of the national discourse on the public policy level in a meaningful way.
Tavis: What do you make, then, of the conversation that we are having of late? Again, you don't have to buy into my formulation on this, but again, as I read it, over the last year or so, it's hard to deny that there has been a kick-up at least in the conversation about it.
Then you can throw in, of course, the Jena 6 issue down in Louisiana. For all kinds of reasons, there is some conversation about Black men. What do you make of that conversation?
McCall: Well, I mean, some of it is about entertainment. I just don't think that it's taken as seriously as some of the problems such as the prison industrial complex and, you know, the murders that are taking place. If it were impacting Whites in the same way that it's impacting Blacks, I think it would be a much more serious conversation.
Tavis: So since that's not the reality, since it's not about White men, this conversation is at least indeed about African American men. If you're right in your assessment that the only way to get a real conversation going that leads to good public policy is to change the skin color of the males who are affected, that ain't going to happen - excuse my English. So how then do we ever get traction, if ever, on a real conversation about Black men in America?
McCall: I think, you know, part of it rests on us as a people. You know, we raise the conversation from time to time and I think we have to raise it and sustain it and keep it on the, you know, front burner as opposed to the back burner especially when we have major elections coming up. We have to like force it onto the agenda and say, "We're not going anywhere until we address this issue in a meaningful way."
So quite often, I think we have so many serious issues that we have to deal with as a community that it becomes difficult to do that. You know, there's no one thing that we can focus on all the time. So it's difficult. It's a juggling act.
Tavis: One last question on "Makes Me Wanna Holler" because it's such a huge success. How did that book personally change your life?
McCall: (Laughter) It changed my life in that I had to -
Tavis: - well, first of all, we knew all your business. That's the first thing (laughter).
McCall: That's what I was going to say, that's what I was going to say. It changed my life in that suddenly I became, you know, like a lab mouse (laughter).
Tavis: You know the good, the bad and the ugly about Nathan McCall, yeah.
McCall: Everything. But I wanted to do that. I wanted to put it all out there for a couple of reasons, the main reason being that, as you know, I went to prison. I grew up on the streets and went to prison for armed robbery. But I wanted to say that, you know, people sometimes do bad things, but it doesn't mean that they're necessarily bad people.
Where Black men are concerned especially, the problems that we face that often lead us to the streets and to prison are much more complex than us just being bad. So here I am. You know, I went to prison, got out, went to college -
Tavis: - applied to go to college while you were in prison.
McCall: While I was in prison.
Tavis: Got a scholarship while you were in prison.
McCall: Right, and then became a journalist and ended up at "The Washington Post." I saw so many guys in prison who had just as much potential as me, so it was important for me to put my story out there as a kind of microcosm for the stories of a lot of Black men in this country, many of whom don't get in a position to write about it.
Tavis: If you never heard of the book, his first book, "Makes Me Wanna Holler," it's a book that's worth reading even now. It came out in 1994 and, in 2007, still relevant, particularly given the conversation we're just having about the plight of Black men on some of these issues that we have not advanced on even today as we approach a new presidential election season.
That said, the new book is called "Them." It is your first novel. When I first got a chance to look at it, I was fascinated - even before I got a chance to read the book - that you would choose a novel to write about another serious issue like gentrification. Ain't nothing fiction about that. That's a very real issue.
McCall: That's a very real issue.
Tavis: So why write about it in novel form?
McCall: Well, I approached it as a journalist. I began noticing it, seeing it going on, moved from D.C. to Atlanta and saw it more. I decided to explore it. I decided at some point that to write about it as nonfiction would not be as powerful than if I wrote about it as fiction. For one thing, fiction gave me the flexibility to get inside the heads of different characters.
The story is about, you know, a Black man who lives in an historic neighborhood in Atlanta that happens to be the neighborhood where Martin Luther King, Jr. was born. He wants to buy the house that he's renting. Then a White couple moves in next door. White couples are moving in throughout the neighborhood.
This guy has to come to terms with his feelings about race, about White people, and vice versa. I felt that the best way to explore that story would be through fiction because I could get inside the heads of the Whites as well as the Blacks.
Tavis: Now that it's behind you, obviously, what do you make of your first attempt, at least published attempt, at fiction? Because you're a nonfiction kind of brother.
McCall: I'm a nonfiction kind of brother. I'm a fiction kind of brother now (laughter). It was challenging. It was very, very difficult. I had to read a lot of fiction and critique a lot of fiction, but it was a good challenge and I like it. You know, some of the most powerful books that I have read were works of fiction.
In fact, the book that changed my life was a work of fiction. It was "Native Son" by Richard Wright. Powerful book, you know. When you look at George Orwell, a lot of our most powerful writings have been fiction. So I like it and I intend to do more fiction projects.
Tavis: You mentioned, of course, that you live in Atlanta. The story, of course, is set in Atlanta. Gentrification is a real issue in Atlanta and not just in Atlanta. I was just on my radio program talking the other day about the fact that, in New Orleans, we had an election a few weeks ago.
This election a few weeks ago gives, for the first time in almost a quarter century, a White majority on the City Council in New Orleans. There are other judge seats and state seats that were won by Whites out of that area. All five or six of these seats that were won in this particular election by Whites had once been held by Blacks.
It's more significant than that. The Registrar of Voters in Orleans Parish says that there are about a hundred thousand folk, most of whom are Black, who are on the rolls that may need to be purged by the presidential election of 2008.
So all those concerns that Black folk had that other folk thought we were being paranoid or crazy about New Orleans never being a Black city again, those patterns are now starting to develop gentrification in New Orleans. Talk to me then about how serious an issue you think gentrification is in Atlanta, in New Orleans and across America.
McCall: I think it's a very serious issue. I think people will make a mistake if they look at New Orleans as an isolated case and tie it solely to Hurricane Katrina. I think it's an indication of what's to come across the country.
In Atlanta, there's a lot of talk that we'll probably have seen the last Black mayor in the city of Atlanta. You know, Whites are moving into the city in droves. Same thing in Washington, D.C. Same thing in Harlem, in New York.
Every city that I go to, every city that I've been to on book tours, one thing we've done is book signings, but we've also held forums where we've talked about this issue and the implications of this issue, particularly for poor Black people, because quite often gentrification means that many poor Black people will be displaced.
I think that, if this issue doesn't become part of the public policy discussion, we run the risk of America ten or twenty years from now looking like France where you've got, you know, Whites with money living in the inner city and then, in the suburbs of Paris, you know, you've got people of color who are living out of sight and out of mind.
Tavis: And that starts to swelter, as we all saw, and all hell breaks loose in Paris as a result.
McCall: Exactly.
Tavis: Let me ask you finally right quick, let's just assume for the moment that this were - it should be, but let's assume that it were - a very real issue being discussed by Democrats and Republicans in this presidential race, that it found its way into the center of the public policy debate. What ought we do about it? What do we do about this issue?
McCall: Well, I think one thing is that politicians are going to have to find a way to protect the people who are living in cities, who have invested in cities for ten or twenty years, and ensure that they don't get pushed out simply because people with money move in and the taxes go up.
They've got to set policy in place that, you know, protects those people. I think there are some things that can be done. I think it can be solved. You know, it's a matter of political will.
Tavis: The book by Nathan McCall, his first fiction book, is called "Them" and addresses the issue of gentrification, as we were discussing, in a fiction way and, to his point, you can put a lot more in it when you write about it as a fiction issue. So Nathan, good to see you, man, and congratulations.
McCall: Good to see you. Thank you.
Back to December 7, 2007