1991, Penguin, NY, 383 pages
The title says it all, fatherless boys looking for a reason to rise and an excuse to rebel against what they intuitively know is a sick, materialistic society. If I were a young black man this would be my life, killing other degenerates and trying to outsmart a system so big and dumb it’s immune to subterfuge.
Kody was a well-off welfare kid in 1974 [more well-off than I was being born in the same year, with two parents working], with the best schooling taxes could pay for, excellent clothes, the latest sneakers, and a yearning for something masculine, something other than his mother could give him. The proof that he never escaped her vagina is in the dedication, “To my dear mother, Birdie M. Scott, who had the courage to push me out in a world of which we control so little.”
Only in an emasculated, materialistic society can a man who has been in gunfights in L.A. and knife fights in Folsom, and who has been shot 7 times, truly believe that a bitch laying an egg and collecting a minimum wage salary for the kid as it raises itself, constitutes heroism.
Kody Scott and I were born in the same year, and if he is alive, we are enemies. But I like his viewpoint; his insistence that he is a soldier of the New Afrikans, that he is forever at war with the white Americans and brown Chicanos. I might see him as my enemy, and he might see me as his enemy, but both see the same evil puppet master pulling his strings above it all.
I liked Kody’s story, his refusal to let go of his militant, adolescent construct, which, for all of its affectations is more authentic than what my parents believed in. He has wisdom of a sort, will never understand how he became a disposable tool for something too big for his shallow mind to grasp, but soldiers on in his mind’s eye with a wisdom appropriate to his perspective, “Prison loomed in my future like wisdom teeth; if you lived long enough you got them. Prison was like a stepping stone to manhood.”
At the end of his book, hopefully just to please his editors or his ‘indomitable” wife, Kody decries the notion that he and the other gang bangers from South Central L.A. destroyed their own neighborhood in the Rodney King Riots any more than the Vietnamese destroyed their own country attacking U.S. firebases. He is against multi-culturalism, and unfortunately regrets the good deeds he did in life, such as killing gangsters, but his heart is in the right place: sour, unfulfilled, lied to and restless despite his age. What I like the most about his story is how he explains his entry into “gangsterism,” by being surprised and betrayed in a “jump in” attack arranged by older boys, which is the same way most gangsters exit the gang life, by taking a bullet in the back of the head from a friend, and he nearly admits it, beating so far around that traitorous bush as to prune it to the trunk.
I like Kody Scott, see him as a worthy foe, and if he is alive, we should arrange a death match. It would make more sense than the next presidential election.
Kody should speak for himself here:
"We cannot contaminate them [our children] with our feuds of madness, which are predicated on factors over which we have no control."
Apparently he is still alive. has a wiki entry:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanyika_Shakur
Thanks, Marko.
I read this book many years ago. Maybe 30? I was repulsed by his whole attitude. He murders, assaults and steals from everyone around him and his conclusion after being put in jail? Society made him do it. Very Clockwork Orange. No responsibility. Spells America, Amerika. All these people should be rounded up, given a small pension (paid for as long as they live) and shipped back to Africa. Let them see how Gen. Buck Naked handles things.
The only thing he got right was the Amerika part. I used to love this country but if it keeps going like it is, damn the hippies, I'll be burning the flag. I don't fly it on holidays anymore.
I tried to keep in mind where he was coming from, and the extreme unlikely hood that he could have broken from his conditioning. He admits to being utterly emasculated in his dedication. The thing that endeared me to his viewpoint was the power of the adolescent delusion he constructed along with others in response to a society which I also count as my enemy. He understands nothing, but has a vague sense that things are not as they are presented. I do not expect him to reason his way out of his blind hate, simply respect the fact that he does hate.
My ability to hate has been severely compromised over the past few years, which makes me kind of envious of a good hater.
I can also well appreciate your opinion of his book, which was certainly written with professional help.
Morally, he comes off as a cipher. But for a person with a perpetual 12-year-old mentality, I thought he acquitted himself well.