Loving Day Read Online Free PDF Page A

shield.
    “You know, I can sign that for you,” I tell her. “If I ever go nuts, try to blow up the Statue of Liberty or something, that would make it worth something.”
    She doesn’t laugh. She just puts on a smile too big for her face and then spins and stomps away from me. Off to the other end of the room, where her grandfather is watching the whole scene.
    “Oh yeah, here we go. It’s showtime now.” Mandingo talks to himself, not me. He’s got a fishing box full of art supplies, and he starts pulling them out. I look up and I see a whole pack of black guys moving in, high school age mostly, some older.
    “My fan base has arrived,” Mandingo says right before they do. Of course he has a fan base. The worse the artist, the better the marketing campaign. There’s four of them, and Mandingo knows each by their first name. I hear them talking, and the intimacy of their knowledge of each other’s lives is surprising. Turns out they follow one another on Twitter. They blow 140-character kisses at each other all day. These guys, they ask me a lot of questions. Polite, interested ones, and by the way they won’t look me in the eye I can tell they looked me up before I got here. The usual questions come: when did you start, what’s yourfavorite thing to draw, what book would you most like to be assigned to. Then this one lands:
    “How come you ain’t got more positive dark-skinned characters in your work?” one of them asks me. He asks it three times, too. The first time, I hear it, but it’s barely audible, just above the din of the room, just low enough that I can ignore it, which I do. I can feel the dread building, but I swallow it for later consumption. About fifteen seconds later the question comes louder, but I keep staring down at the charcoal in my hands, drawing. This time, it’s clear I’m ignoring the asker, that I’m not trying to play these race games, having reached my quota for the hour. Mandingo, for his part, offers to show the crew some of his new work, the pencils for his next issue of
Afro-Dike-Y
. Apparently, she is fighting a villain named Brickhouse, who from appearances seems to have been driven criminally insane by elephantiasis of the boobies. Some of the guys, distracted or flinching from confrontation, move closer to Mandingo’s side of the table and
oooh
. But not this kid. He just asks the same damn thing all over again, so loud that even silence would be an answer to him.
    I look up, and of course he is the lightest-skinned one here besides me. Of course he is. This defender of the darker masses. And what am I to say to him? I didn’t write this work, I just drew it. They sent me a script, and I drew it. The characters, they all came with descriptions of how they looked, which were mostly based on images of famous people of the period, and I was given the images of those people as well. The guy who wrote it did this, not me. The guy who wrote it, go pick on him. The guy who wrote it, a guy I’ve never met or even talked to on the phone, he really might be color struck, but not me. You can get his email from his website. I’m sure he would love to hear from you.
    I tell him this, and I am exhausted from it. I stay chipper though, smiling, and we are both relieved. If we were the type of people who enjoyed confrontation, we would have put down the comics years ago and started punching people in the face for real, instead of just looking at illustrated violence.
    He buys a book, has me sign it to “Leon.” Shakes my hand frontand then sideways and ends it with a snap. With the final handshake test, I have proven I am black. I have returned to America to defend my Negro title triumphantly. Again I have used the timbre in my voice to show that I too speak the language, that I do not distance myself from him. I have temporarily compensated for my paler skin, my straightish hair, and the fact that my dad was a honky. I have passed the exam presented to me. Yay. Don’t we all