Sag Harbor

Benji describes the beach map of the Hamptons, saying that the Black subdivisions like Azurest, Sag Harbor Hills, and Ninevah, were off the map, their lives relegated to the margins. This captures Benji’s experience of Black representations in pop culture as well. As he forms his identity, he looks to cultural role models. The contradictory models offer him a limited and confusing sense of how he should live his life. Hip-hop artists examine inner-city life, a topic foreign to Benji since his upper middle class upbringing doesn’t give him much insight into the gritty struggles of the inner city. The Cosby Show in some ways is much closer to his experience. After all, his father is a doctor and his mother a lawyer, but it too fails to capture his reality with the idealized portrait of family life. Some of his friends create a militant Black persona informed by both pop culture and later Black Studies classes in college, but this rings hollow for Benji as he sees the hypocrisy in holding on to their wealth and privilege while attempting to create an authentic street image.

In the end, Benji tries to map out a new reality, embracing his Black roots and the Black community at Sag Harbor, while also feeling free to enjoy the white influences he’s absorbed during the school year. Benji makes a point to say that he does not find his life to be a paradox, though he is aware that the world sees his life that way. The book can be seen as a way to chronicle the less-told, marginalized stories of young, middle-class, Black men, stories that haven’t yet been represented in music or on television.

Benji’s firefly description is an apt analogy to highlight this gap in representation. Benji notes that the firefly’s name is misleading since it is named for the brief light it gives off that can be seen by humans. That light represents mere fractions of its life, failing to capture the whole of its existence: “It was a bad name because it was incomplete—both parts were true, the bright and the dark, the one we could see and the other one we couldn’t. It was both” (184).

In a sense, Benji is a firefly. The Black experience that he hears in hip-hop music or sees on tv shows captures only incomplete fractions of his reality. The story he tells, in its exhaustive detail, is a way to give a fuller account to that incomplete story. He wants to give the full texture of his life, in all of its fumblings, humilities, gaps, embarrassments, failures, and yes, beauty. He wants to bring the awkward and poignant texture of that summer in Sag Harbor alive for the reader to provide a broader and more honest map.

Benji and his friends understand “[you] were hard or else you were soft, in the slang drawn from the territory of manhood” (176). They are “black boys with beach houses.” They are not hardened from life in the streets, as they have heard about and seen in pop culture. They don’t want to be seen as weak and soft, so they take on the mask of hardness since that is how they see masculinity represented in pop culture.

The boys need to learn to be adept with the mask, knowing in what situations they must pass as “hard” and when they can pass as “soft: “We talked one way in school, one way in our homes, and another way to each other. We got guns. We got guns for a few days one summer and then got rid of them. Later some of us got real guns” (177). They learn the appropriate behavior needed based on the social situation as they navigate both white and Black circles and all different levels of social class. In this way, they are aware of code-switching in a way white youth typically is not. However, we learn later that one of Benji’s friends dies and another is paralyzed from “actual bullets” (191). The stakes of code-switching successfully are much higher for Black youth in the eighties than white youth.

As Benji searches for models for his identity, he is informed by a wide range of pop culture influences from the eighties. The Cosby Show has finished its first season, popular for its portrayal of middle-class Black Americans whose lives are a far cry from the street life portrayed in hip-hop but much closer to Benji’s reality. The Benji’s father’s unbalanced nature distances Benji from identifying too closely with the Cosby household. Movies like Star Wars are also a huge influence as he plays with his Luke Skywalker and Han Solo action figures until he learns that Black children should be playing with Black action figures. He gives up his Luke Skywalker and Han Solo toys in favor of creating his own character, Greedo’s cousin, which is a “credit to his race” (160). Road Warrior is also a favorite movie of Benji’s with its creation of a haven in a post-apocalyptic world, in a way paralleling the creation of Azurest during the Jim Crow world of the 1940s.

He and his friends love the hip-hop and rap of Black artists, though Benji realizes the gap between the content of some of the lyrics, which focus on life in the inner city, and the lives that he and his friends lead. He often finds more affinity with the music of white artists: “Let’s just put it out there: I liked the Smiths” (63).

Benji has particular respect for artists who can sample well. Benji admires the melding of two styles of music when he points out that the DJ Afrika Bambaataa sampled part of a German band’s song for his music. Benji appreciates the creative sampling, the “paradox” of white and Black music (77) merged together, but Marcus gets defensive: “Afrika Bambaataa didn’t steal anything. This is their song” (76). Marcus accuses Benji of liking white music. (Marcus later admits to enjoying the recent Tears for Fears video, showing an affinity for “white music” himself.) Benji points out that later “sampling became an art form” (76) and he admires how Afrika Bambaataa “dismantled this piece of white culture and produced this freakish and sustaining thing, reconfiguring the chilly original into a communal artifact” (77). Benji marvels at the appropriation, the expert mixing of two different influences in creating a new sample, which gives Benji a way to think about his own experience. He too must learn to sample expertly, absorbing white prep school culture during the school year and Azurest middle-class Black culture during the summer, using both to create his own identity.

In Sag Harbor, there is a clear sense of boundaries. Black and white people feel a sense of trespass when they cross into another race’s territory. They carefully avoid visiting the same beachfronts at the same times of day, even though segregation was legally banished decades prior. Benji, who searches for likeminded people and influences, realizes that his own identity and imagination cannot be similarly segregated. His watchful gaze observes the entire world before him, and his tastes are formed by this mixing of boundaries, as he samples and fractures his 1980s world, allowing him to embrace a range of influences and make them his own.