Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture: Love, Literature, and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

If you were to thumb through the book, you would notice other things, too: margins overrun with ink, questions demanded, allusions uncovered, arcana circled and defined, arguments digested and broken down, rebuttals and counterarguments sustained and advanced—you would see a probing mind, the mind of what society had designated a nigger, waging intellectual warfare.You would see acts of civil disobedience (whether they were violent or not would only depend on your perspective). If you were to walk several paces beyond Pappy’s study, back into my bedroom, however, and sift through the stacks of Vibe magazines, the towers of CDs and mountains of Nike Airs, and come upon some of my books, you would see something else entirely. You would see pristine texts that had not been hard-won but that had been given to me (Plutarch’s Lives, say). Inside the cover there would be the same familiar handwriting (“To—Thomas Chatterton Williams; From, Pappy, with best wishes—always! Dec. 6, 1995, Days at Fanwood, New Jersey *Note: These are lives worth studying carefully.”) If you were to flip through the pages, though, you would see only evidence of absence, a lack of marginalia and wear and tear, a kind of apophatic argument, a mind unaware of what so recently was at stake, a perfunctory mind, the mind of a comfortable and pampered teenager who just happened to be black—the way he happened to be skinny and happened to have long fingers—and against whom society hardly could be said to hold a...