Makes Me Wanna Holler

Nathan McCall’s 1994 autobiography, Makes Me Wanna Holler, is about growing up in a working-class black section of Portsmouth, Virginia in the 1960s and 1970s. McCall was a smart boy, but despite a strong family unit and a caring community, he fell into crime. From a young age, he was tormented by racism. He recounts violent racism when attending an integrated elementary school, a depressing level of inequality of opportunity when looking for work as a teenager, and both observing and experiencing very racist labor conditions while working for whites. Angry, and with a desire to avoid the white man’s system, McCall first began shoplifting, then breaking and entering people’s homes, selling drugs, and finally turned to armed robbery. He was arrested first as a teenager, for shoplifting; when older, he shot a man in the chest. Luckily, the man lived, and McCall received only probation. After a botched armed robbery of a McDonald’s in a white neighborhood, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison.

McCall improved himself in prison. He was ready for a change. He had been sliding uncontrollably and knew he was capable of more. In jail in Norfolk, he began educating himself by reading black authors.