Face to Face, Race to Race : Blame and guilt. Guilt and blame. The uproar over Nathan McCall’s angry memoir underscores that the search for understanding between black and white has barely begun.

As a restless adolescent, Nathan McCall had a sure way to vent his rage: He’d get together with his buddies and thrash a passing “white boy.” Any white boy.

Beating a victim with sticks, kicking him in the testicles and stomping on his head as it gushed blood, “made us feel good inside,” McCall writes in his autobiography, “Makes Me Wanna Holler--A Young Black Man in America.”

McCall and his pals also had a way to release sexual tension: They lured unsuspecting neighborhood girls--African American girls--and gang-raped them.

Coming of age in the 1960s and ‘70s, McCall committed burglaries, took drugs, dealt drugs, robbed people, did drive-bys and shot a young black rival in the chest point-blank.

“In that moment,” McCall writes, “I felt like God.”

Twenty years later and on the road to promote “Holler,” McCall looks dazed as he enters the glistening lobby of the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills.

In many corners, television and radio hosts have adopted the handsome author with the hip goatee--now a reporter at the Washington Post--as their latest media darling.

But last week, McCall stepped into the crucible of L.A. talk radio and abruptly became a lightning rod for a city brimming with its own rage about violence, race and responsibility.

During Michael Jackson’s KABC radio show, listeners learned that McCall received a 30-day sentence for shooting that black man, but later got 12 years for robbing a white-owned McDonald’s. To McCall, the message was clear: “The Establishment holds very low regard for the value of black life as opposed to the value of white property.”

“No,” Jackson interrupted, the civility draining from his British lilt. “ You hold very low regard for black life. We haven’t tried to kill anyone. You have.”

Callers were no more gentle.

An hour later, McCall, 40, took off his African-style cap and laid his sports coat on one of the hotel room’s two queen beds. Slumping into an antique chair, his head lolled back like a slug-drunk prizefighter’s.

“It was clear to me early on that the interview was going to be more like a feeding frenzy than a dialogue,” McCall says, his words slipping out in a long sigh.

But what can you expect? he asks. Jackson made him sound as if he hadn’t transcended his criminal youth, hadn’t grappled with the convoluted meaning of his actions; made him out to be “just another black man making excuses.”

Jackson is not the only reader to find McCall infuriatingly adept at blaming “the white man” for his failings. “Black rage by itself, deeply justified though it is, is no longer news,” the New York Times Book Review said, later adding: “Mr. McCall does not sound like an easy person to live or work with.”

But other critics heap praise on McCall for what they see as his unflinchingly honest insight into America’s cycle of responsibility and blame.

Indeed, while McCall gets hammered and soothed, his book may be emerging as a painful catalyst for people struggling toward a higher and more complex level of race relations.

*

Nathan McCall grew up in Cavalier Manor, a working-class black neighborhood in Portsmouth, Va. Built in the early ‘60s, the neighborhood boasted big homes and streets named after prominent African Americans: Belafonte Drive, Basie Crescent, Horne Avenue.

McCall’s stepfather, retired Navy, worked weekdays as a guard at the naval shipyards and did weekend gardening jobs in a white suburb. Nathan and his brothers lived a “Huck Finn” childhood, playing cowboys and Indians, skinny dipping in a nearby lake and mowing lawns for spare change.

Cavalier Manor was the sort of supportive community that pundits mourn these days, where neighbors watched each others’ children for signs of misbehavior and teachers and parents chatted after church.

As Nate and his friends edged uneasily into adolescence, though, a flood of influences swept away their innocence. While concerned parents talked about self-respect and the dignity of work, the dudes on the corner taught that peers conferred street respect. And that respect accrued most readily, he writes, to “a crazy nigger or a baad nigger.” In a long series of small decisions, McCall evolved from mischievous scamp to petty criminal to dangerous thug.

His conscience spoke up from time to time, urging him, for instance, to explain himself to the mother who had tried so hard to insulate him from the ugly life he embraced. But, McCall writes, “I couldn’t process my confusion sufficiently in my own head to explain it to someone else.”

Likewise, remorse occasionally flickered through his consciousness after a criminal act. But added respect on the street invariably chased that soft emotion into hiding.

McCall finally went to prison for pointing a .32 caliber pistol at a McDonald’s manager’s head during a robbery: “Intuitively,” McCall writes from his then-19-year-old perspective, “I sensed he was an Uncle Tom, one of those head-scratching niggers, willing to put his devalued life on the line to protect the white man’s property.”

His prison stint put him in contact with the usual sources of unofficial rehab: Nation of Islam Muslims, cellblock philosophers. The strongest influence, however, may have been Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” the classic novel about Bigger Thomas, an angry young black man who blunders into violence and is imprisoned.

McCall saw in Bigger the same “restless anger, hopelessness, the tough facade among blacks and a deep-seated fear of whites--that I’d sensed in myself but was unable to express.”

The book made him sob. It also made him read more and inspired his desire to write. Eventually, McCall wrote so well that he was offered a journalism scholarship to Norfolk State University, where he had once robbed students. He accepted it when he was paroled after three years in prison and excelled.

In the March 7 New Yorker, Henry Louis Gates compares McCall’s book to Claude Brown’s “Manchild in the Promised Land” and to Wright’s novels. He says McCall may well provide the voice of a generation and warmly applauds his metamorphosis: “Bigger Thomas becoming Richard Wright.”

But Gates also notes a puzzle. While the prison transformation is comprehensible, another is less so: Why did Nathan McCall become Bigger Thomas in the first place?

That question may be at the root of what rankles those who seem ready to string up the adult McCall.

*

McCall stares across a small desk in his hotel room: “I think the first inclination of a white person is to say, ‘I haven’t oppressed anybody. I haven’t seen anyone oppress anybody. So what are they talking about?’ It’s often hard trying to explain to a white person how you experience oppression and then how you internalize it, and what you do with it once you internalize it.”

Indeed, even now, there are people who wonder what McCall is talking about. In “Holler,” the author describes his climb through the ranks of journalism, from a small Virginia paper, to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, to the coveted newsroom of the Washington Post.

He perceived racism at every step, including confrontations that his white colleagues saw as the standard conflicts that ignite amid fierce competition.

McCall stands by his interpretation but acknowledges that oppression is often in the eye of the beholder: “You don’t even know half the time whether something is really attributable to racism or not. . . . Race has gotten so much under our skin that it’s hard to tell.”

He also says that “to a certain degree, nothing held me back but my mind.”

But then, of course, a young mind is invariably shaped by outside influences. It took awhile before even McCall noticed the forces he now believes undermined his identity.

He recalls his beloved grandmother, Bampoose, who would come home from her housekeeping job with a wealthy family and hold McCall and his brothers up to the example of their flawless white children.

And on weekends, the boys often went with their stepfather to the fancy suburb where he gardened. They seethed at having to pull crabgrass for a white woman. They thought less of their stepfather for doing so, and later McCall would bristle at a white boss’s nagging.

Countless men of McCall’s age will read such scenes and think back to their own youth. They pulled weeds. Bosses heaped abuse on them. Yet they took it as a fact of life.

For many people, a man’s repeated discussion of such matters might sound like sniveling, plain and simple.

McCall ruminated on that a few years ago when he returned to his hometown and saw two white men driving a truck with “lawn and garden care” on the side.

It dawned on him, he says: “My stepfather had a business.”

But then, those white gardeners weren’t burdened with the nagging knowledge that since slavery, whites have had a tradition of humiliating black adults and treating them as children.

“For a white man working for another white man, that kind of degradation and humiliation is not an issue, the issue is the job,” McCall says, pressing his fingers together until the tips turn beige. “For us, the issue has always been, ‘Am I gonna have to face the prospect of exchanging a paycheck for humiliation? Is it going to be conditional?’ ”

Those questions, McCall says, kept him from seeing heroism in his stepfather’s hard work:

“When I looked at my stepfather, I think that may have been one of the first times I saw limitations. Does this mean I’m gonna be a gardener, working for white folks down the road? As a 13-year-old, I looked at him as a potential role model, and I looked at the guys hanging on the corner, who were posturing and acting bad and at least giving the perception that they were men, and the choice for me was easy.”

Such a warped model of manhood contorts the psyche, and confuses the clean distinction between victim and victimizer that a frustrated society increasingly demands. Even as a prospering professional, McCall writes about his gang assaults on “white boys,” for example, not with remorse for the physical and psychic damage he inflicted, but with regret that he no longer has that therapeutic outlet: “Man, that used to take the stress outta me.”

Challenged about that, McCall again spins the wheel of responsibility-and-blame: He only started hating whites after a bunch of white boys beat him up in junior high, he says. And don’t forget that when he was a boy, whites sometimes drove by in cars, threw things at him, and called him “nigger.”

Furthermore, he asks, “How often in interviews do white people ask other white people if they have remorse?”

*

Still, McCall’s voice catches as he reflects on the televised beating, 25 years after his assaults, of Reginald Denny.

“The thing that struck me most about that,” he says, “was how so many innocent people get consumed, get eaten up by this racial hatred. . . . (Later) I saw (Denny as) this guy who really, really embodied forgiveness. . . . They didn’t catch a Klansman. They caught a good human being coming through there. And that hurt me.”

Which doesn’t mean McCall agrees with those who would throw away the prison-door key for Denny’s attackers.

“The front end” is the place to stop crime and address racial animosity, McCall says: Improve education, create opportunity. Filling more prisons with “three strikes and you’re out” legislation won’t work, he contends.

“For every 17-year-old you lock up, there’s someone else who just celebrated his 17th birthday. If he’s subjected to the same forces that shaped the thinking of the first 17-year-old, then he will replace him.”

But wait. Stop the wheel! society might shout at this point.

If dangerous young men, such as those McCall describes in his book, were locked up for longer spells, wouldn’t the streets be safer for the majority of young black men who have never committed a crime--for McCall’s own 20-year-old son? Would the number of mothers crying at children’s funerals not decline if more violent criminals stayed behind bars?

McCall ponders that. “Yeaaaah, I guess you could say that. . . . But you know, you could probably say the same thing about me. . . . (And) here I am. I think I’ve been trying to contribute something ever since I got out of prison.”

Still, a caller to Jackson’s radio program--who identified herself as a black woman--didn’t care that McCall has been creative, rather than destructive, for 20 years.

“I believe you should be behind bars,” she said, reflecting society’s growing frustration with the slaughter on the streets and a growing impatience for solutions--future Nathan McCalls be damned.

McCall agrees there is a growing impatience.

But to give in to that, he says, “suggests that society has done everything it can do to address the problem. And that’s not the case.”