Whitehead introduces DuBois "double consciousness" early and with a light touch in his father's two track listening habits when driving to Sag Harbor -- either Easy Listening or black political radio. "When a song came on that he didn't like or stirred a feeling he didn't want to have, he switched over to the turbulent rhetoric of the call-in shows, and when some knucklehead came on advocating some idea he found too cowardly or too much of a sellout, he switched back to the music."
Easy Listening, as exemplified by the Carpenters "Top of the World" is "like the lid of a sugar bowl tinkling open and closed to expose deep dunes of whiteness."
Black Talk Radio's "playlist" is "headline after headline of outrage, in constant rotation were bloody images of Michael Stewart choked to death by cops, Grandma Eleanor Bumpers shot to death by cops, Yusef Hawkins shot to death by racist thugs."
Another kind of double introduced in the early pages is Benji's near twin (they were born 10 mos. apart) brother Reggie. Further doubling in the divide between city existence and Sag Harbor summers -- to be in Sag is to be "out."
The civil rights lawyers Mr. and Mrs. Finkelstein's race consciousness: they "respected all races, colors, and creeds unless that creed was their own." That their daughter has Benji, a black classmate in her private school, helps allay their guilt. "Sending their daughter to a fancy private school was a betrayal of core values, paying tuition when you were supposed to support public schools being in traitorous equivalence with eating grapes when you were supposed to boycott grapes. Those days, every nonunionized grape was a tear squeezed out of the eye of a migrant worker's eyes."
Generic snack foods circa 1985: "Mini Hot Dogs, La Choy, Egg Rolls, and other lovelies of the Preheat to 350 school."
Pop songs such as "Betty Davis Eyes," "Xanadu," and "Big Shot": "they were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture."
Arrival in Sag Harbor after "nine months banishment in the city"; sense the the place comes back into being with return, "the illusion that the town was switched off when we weren't around."
Black/White reversals in Benji's and Reggie's sneakers. Reggie has new B-boy style Filas, "a little further out into the street than we ever ventured," that he meticulously keeps white. Benji recently switched to punk-style black Chuck Taylors that have become dilapidated -- "the black canvas had sickened to an uneven gray, and the toe bumpers a jaundiced yellow" -- from their passage across "whole marathons of Manhattan pavement."
Suggestion this will be the last summer of Benji's and Reggie's "twinhood."
Arrival in the summer town. "No matter the size of make of the house, the early arrivals were tormented by the same questions. Did the roof keep through the winter, did the pipes hold, did a townie or local bad kid break in and steal the television, or was it just the raccoons and squirrels who had given the place the once-over? Is it still here or did I dream it?
Benji and Reggie come across their soul-centric pal NP ("Nigger Please") who also has new Filas, kept meticulously white. Also like Reggie he's abandoned bike riding.
Benji's own act of self-styling is to declare his name as Ben.
Being "out" for the season. Whitehead glosses: "there was also the language of the prison in there, in how long are you out for. Time on the East End was furlough, a day pass, a brief visit with the old faces and names before the inevitable moment when you were locked-up again. That hard time that defined the majority of our days. You did something wrong, why else would something like the city happen to you."
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