Katt Williams, The Book of Clarence, and How Not to Tell Black Stories

A note on the Black stories that move us...and those that don't.

On the eve of Donald Trump being president (again), colicky toddlers crying in the streets, the one dread on Troy Avenue cursing the shop owner who’s turned him away—”EIGHT YEARS I COMING TO YOUR RAAAASCLAAAT STORE AND”—and my nerves, frayed from the plague, jumping out from inside bell peppers at the grocery aisle, dizzying and dilating pupils more than the 562 blunts I used to smoke annually, I don’t know how to tell a story. 

I dead forgot how this thing’s supposed to go. 

I figure my best bet is probably copying Anthony Oriol. Like the best storytellers, Ant was a master of several forms: freestyle rapping, the dozens, shit-talking, lying, spitting game, and earnestly asking for money and favors. All of these disciplines require mastery that Ant seemed to have acquired by age nineteen when I met him on the Morehouse College campus. He was sporting these Nike foam squishy shoes (I went and copped the same later that summer; ahead of their time). They looked like swimmer fins for the urban set. Ant claimed Brooklyn, and I could hear it in his accent, but more saw it in his demeanor. The boy was twitchy, quick to smile, laugh off insults or shade, puff his Haitian nostrils in indignant opposition. 

“Ricketts!” he’d exclaim and make you feel like you were the main character in a buddy comedy. I loved that about Ant. Later when they told me Ant had gone crazy, broken into some ex-girlfriend’s apartment complex, gotten shot by the police, I fixed my fingers to type in every comments section, “That wasn’t the Ant I knew.” 

It probably wasn’t but whatever. It was like 16 years after I knew him, and shit changed but it also didn’t change.

Ant was, to be generous, a fabulist. By the summer of pre-freshman Morehouse flunkies and junkies, the core group of kids who wouldn’t have gotten into college without a precipitous push over the cliff branch, Ant and I were fast friends. It was me, him, Rob, and Earv who had some connection to Brooklyn, either living there or having lived there, being Caribbean, being Black, being confused, being delinquent, being inattentive, being gifted, being unrealized, being a lot, and then, suddenly, being a little. Being a lot until it fizzled into not enough, and being confused at how we’d gotten there. I had failed Physics and Chemistry at a top private school—not difficult to imagine—but it felt like I was in a detention center at Morehouse. The classes were too easy. The Hamlet and Midsummer Night’s Dream lessons I’d torn though in middle school were made twice as boring and never quite compared to Ant. We had to sit through remedial readers, taking their first bite of the unripe orange of literacy, and pretend we weren’t thinking of meeting Spelman sisters, hopping off to Lenox Mall, and getting lineups for homecoming. 

“They was cool, but they’re, like, some little girls,” Ant described our first spellbound visit from the Spelmanites like we were prepubescent and we followed his big, light-skinned lips down an Pacific Coast trail starting from the pinks of his gums and ending at the V-cut of his abs. His hips spoke as much as his mouth did and his overblown hand gestures—”There was one chica on the cruise ship, the ass was like thisssss, son, I can’t even lie to you.” He abracadabra-ed his spidery fingers into hourglass ghosts and humped the vanishing silhouettes from our imagined holograms. Ant had spent the gap year after high school working on a cruise ship, as a dock boy or a port jockey, or some shit I didn’t know about so it sounded much more adult than his improvised air humps.

“Which one you like, Ricketts? Tell me which one you like, we’ll get that one. What? You not a virgin, Ricketts?!”

I wasn’t but I sure felt like a fucking virgin with the impromptu interrogation taking place as the pencil and tennis-skirted crew of Spelman girls lingered just long enough for the bold ones to think of approaching. You had to “bag” or you were not a Morehouse man, just another DL dude maybe, or an Atlanta misfit. 

When I learned of Ant’s misdeeds, and how he’d been punished with a bullet, I thought of how great it was to believe a lie even if it was a lie. Had he worked in New York’s most élite restaurant kitchen, crushing the back of the house, fucking the pretty older waitresses between shifts? How would I have known if he didn’t. The way he told it, like Mary Karr said, with convincingly arbitrary flourishes, gave me enough food for my starved teenage libido. 

Then, like a week ago, in came Katt Williams with the YouTube interview of the century. His soliloquies, jostling host Shannon Sharpe out of skin-tight cashmere and up to the ceiling, captivated me. But not for the reasons others had pointed out (petty quibbles with copycat comedians). No. It’s ‘cause Katt is the best goddamn liar I’ve ever seen. A great liar knows when to play the truth to his advantage. A truth that backs you down before that bodacious lie lets its nuts hang on your shoulders post-dunk.   

He read 3,000 books a year as a child. He ran a sub-4.4 40-yard dash (at 50 years old). He’d gotten all the movie offers Kevin Hart got. Not a single truth there, but he didn’t line those up in sequence. He garnished the lies with bouquets of truth, with plausible, sometimes verifiable recollections of past trauma. He even gave room for non-believers to run to the jurist’s chair. 

“Y’all will believe anything!”

“Journalism is dead and the internet swallowed it!” 

We’re missing the point of Black stories. We’re missing the fun of Black fantasy. Katt Williams perched atop his grievances, propped up by his marvelous pen game, and all you could think about was the integrity of his yarn as he spun us a beautifully layered woolen duvet to cocoon us from the harsh hangover of Pandemic Year Four. You’re stuck on managing expectations, rescheduling missed appointments, and hitting KPIs, and Katt just wants you to remember your heart. Remember the moments that made you laugh embarrassingly at the stupid lies you told to impress a girl. At least he had the good decency to rehearse. You didn’t. 

I watched The Book of Clarence and American Fiction, the latter based on my favorite novelist, Percival Everett’s work. Cord Jefferson and Jeymes Samuel, the auteurs tasked with cinematic reprisal of Great Black Stories, did good not great work. No shade to them. It’s hard to re-write or revise good-ass lies like Percival Everett’s myths or The Bible. Where Jefferson soared with the source material, parachuting into some late-stage capitalist version of literary assimilation, he sailed short of the sun on female character substance, or how Black trauma porn looks in the social media-verse, where hucksters sell Civil Rights hashtags to auto dealers and Super PACS. It’s wild out here, and his retelling of Erasure, frankly, erased a lot of that. But its intimacy peeked through nonetheless. The Book of Clarence achieved no such feat, relying on bombast and musical numbers to chariot through a Christ myth that always needs some refreshing. The joke of a White Jesus could’ve been an entire subplot, and it’s instead a “deleted scene”-level irony, an afterthought. His cast carried the cross for him, with LaKeith Stanfied playing a dopey anti-hero that’s much more relatable than Jesus H., the legend. 

The best gift a blog gives you is the reset. I think it’s hard to tell the same lies, and tell a good-ass, Black-ass story. The lies have to ratchet up a little each time, survive the editing guillotine. I hope and know you’ll allow me the room as long as I keep dredging up what I have inside me.