Summary
Don looks at the shopkeeper and simply says, "I see," before walking out of the store. Tony follows.
We see Don playing in a concert hall, to thunderous applause. The scene shifts to Tony hand washing his shirt in his hotel room, when the phone rings. He picks it up and goes to the YMCA in Macon, where an officer brings him back to the locker room. Don is sitting naked beside a white man, also naked, and a policeman tells Tony that the manager found Don and the other man, implying that they were in a sexual situation. Don also has a cut on his face, which implies that the men also got in a fight of some kind.
When the cops say that they have to arrest Don, Tony tells them he will give them money as a thank you for letting Don go. He tells the policemen he'll buy them two nice suits.
Outside, Don tells Tony, "They were wrong for the way they treated me and you rewarded them." Tony fires back that he was just looking out for him and making sure he didn't miss his next show, also suggesting that if word got out about Don's sexuality, it could ruin his career, but Don accuses him of being selfish, just wanting to make sure Don played all his gigs so he can get paid. "Of course I don't want you to miss a show, you ungrateful bastard! You think I'm doing this for my health? Tonight I saved your ass. Show a little appreciation."
The two men drive to Memphis, Tennessee, and Tony asks Don if he wants some makeup to cover up the bruise on his face. Defensively, Don insists that he's fine. Outside a hotel, Tony recognizes two Italian guys from New York, who tell them they're there on business. In Italian, they tease him for working for a black man, and offer him work, but he tells them he already has a job. One of the men tells Tony to meet him at the bar at 8, and Tony agrees.
In his room, Don drinks whiskey alone and applies makeup to the wound on his face. When Tony comes out of his room later to go have a drink with his mafia friend, Don stops him in the hall and asks him where he's going, speaking in Italian to suggest that he knows what was said between Tony and the two men. Speaking in fluent Italian, Don tells Tony they need to talk before Tony goes and talks to the men downstairs. Then, in English, he says, "I think you're doing a wonderful job, so I'd like to formally offer you the position of my road manager," and tells him he would get a raise if he accepted.
Tony declines Don's offer, then tells Don he's just going to tell the men that he cannot work for them. When Don apologizes to Tony about the previous night, Tony shrugs and says, "I've been working in nightclubs my entire life. I know it's a complicated world."
In the lobby of the hotel, Tony and Don drink together, and Tony asks how Don learned to play. Don tells him he learned to play on an old spinet, and began performing as a child. He was the first black man accepted to the Leningrad Conservatory of Music, and he started out playing classical music, but was persuaded by his record company to play popular music. The logic behind it was that Don would never get accepted as a black classical pianist. "Wanted to turn me into just another colored entertainer," he says.
Tony tells Don he thinks that if he had stuck with classical it would have been a mistake, that his music is special because "only you can do that." Don thanks him, but says, "But not everyone can play Chopin. Not like I can."
We see them on the road yet again, then at a rest stop, where Don dictates a letter for Tony to write to his wife. We see Dolores reading the letter aloud to her girlfriends, and one of them marvels at how expressive Tony is. In the kitchen, Tony's male relatives discuss the fact that Tony is such a well-spoken man, and one of them says, "I'm just sayin': we're an arty family."
A travel montage. We see Don playing in Little Rock, Arkansas, then Tony and Don driving, then the duo arriving in Louisiana, where the arrangement of a black man with a white driver is looked at skeptically by a teenaged couple in a neighboring car. Tony flips his middle finger at the couple. Christmas approaches and we see Dolores and her children decorating the tree.
Don and Tony drive through a heavy rain. Suddenly a cop pulls them over and asks to see Tony's license. Tony is relieved, as they have gotten lost in the rainstorm, but the cop orders him to step out of the car. The cop asks why Tony is driving Don, and Don tells him, "He's my boss."
The cop tells Tony that Don isn't allowed to be out at night in this town and orders the other cop to get Don out of the car. When the cop tells Tony, "You're half a nigger yourself," Tony punches him in the face and the other cop points his gun at Tony.
The two of them end up in jail. There, Don asks the policemen why he has been imprisoned after doing nothing, and when they do not respond kindly, he tells them, "I want to speak to my lawyer. I want my call. This is a flagrant violation of my rights." With this, one of the policemen agrees to let him make a call.
In the cell, Don scolds Tony for getting them put in jail and compromising his ability to play a show in Birmingham. "Was it worth it? You never win with violence," Don says, "You only win when you maintain your dignity. Dignity always prevails."
Suddenly the police station gets a call from someone who they all seem very intimidated by. Tony stands as he hears the policeman on the phone speaking in a highly respectful voice. Don tells Tony that he called Robert Kennedy to help them.
In the car, Tony is excited that Robert Kennedy saved them, but Don calls it "humiliating." "You shouldn't have hit him!" Don says, and scolds him for getting so angry about being called a racial slur, a word he has had to endure his whole life. This sets Tony off, and he tells Don that he doesn't even know anything about being black. "You don't even know who Little Richard is!" Tony yells, and Don tells him he has no idea what he's talking about.
Tony goes on, telling Don that his life is hard, that he has to hustle and live in the same house everyone in his family has always lived in. "I live on the streets, you sit on a throne. So yeah, my world is way more blacker than yours," Tony says, definitively. Don tells him to pull over and when he does, begins walking away in the rain.
"Yes I live in a castle, Tony. Alone! And rich white people pay me to play piano for them because it makes them feel cultured. But as soon as I step off that stage, I go right back to being just another nigger to them. Because that is their true culture. And I suffer that slight alone, cuz I'm not accepted by my own people," Don says, furious. "So if I'm not white enough, and I'm not black enough, and I'm not man enough, then tell me, Tony, what am I?"
They drive on in silence for awhile, when Don tells Tony that he wants to sleep soon. Tony offers to find a hotel and sneak him into his room, but Don refuses to "stay at an establishment where [he's] not welcome."
They pull up to a beat-up looking hotel and get a room together. When Tony smokes on the bed, Don asks him to put it out. Tony is writing a letter to Dolores and Don reminds him that he'll be home before the letter arrives. "Yeah, I know. Just thought I'd bring it with me," Tony says. When Don offers to make the letter better, Tony tells him he has the hang of it. Don grabs it and reads it aloud. It compares Dolores to a house with all the lights on inside, where everyone is happy. "You got it," Don says approvingly. As Don gets into bed, Tony thanks him for help with the letters and recommends that Don write a letter to his brother. "The world is full of lonely people afraid to make the first move," Tony says.
Before they fall asleep, Tony tells Don that women's breasts were not larger in Pittsburgh, disappointed.
Analysis
Don's identity becomes all the more complicated in Macon, when he gets caught at the YMCA in a sexual situation with a white man. In this moment, Don is degraded not only for being a black man in the South, but for being a black man who has sex with men. The police officers want to lock him up, and Don has blood on his face, suggesting that some kind of physical altercation took place following the incident that was fueled by hate. Thus we see that Don is contending not only with the isolation of fame, the life of a musician, and the pain of prejudice, but also with homophobia and a less-than normative sexual identity.
Tony can never seem to handle things the way that Don would like. While Don analyzes matters from an ethical perspective, Tony is more visceral and hotheaded, trying to solve problems to his advantage without thinking too hard about their broader ramifications. For instance, when he saves Don from arrest, he makes nice with the cops, paying them off to let Don go. From Don's perspective, this is completely undignified, in that it sends a message that the cops were right to arrest him. From Tony's perspective, he did what he had to do to save Don.
Throughout the film, Don and Tony alternate which one of them takes care of the other. Immediately after Tony saves Don from getting arrested after the altercation at the YMCA, Don saves Tony from going and having a meeting with the two mafia men who tracked him down in Memphis. Tony has something to teach Don about looking out for himself more actively, and Don has something to teach Tony about doing what's right. Thus, it turns out that the ways these two men are different compliment each other in unusual and unexpected ways.
Not only is Don profiled and ridiculed in the South, but Tony is as well. When they get pulled over at night in the rainstorm, the policeman who pulls them over tells Tony that, as an Italian, he is "half a nigger" himself. Tony, who has been uncharacteristically well-tempered in the presence of a Southern cop, cannot control himself, and decks the policeman in the face. When faced with racial slurs launched at him, Tony becomes enraged, and his response is at once absurd—in that it contrasts so thoroughly with the collected resignation of the actual black man—and evidence of his identification with Don's plight.
Don is portrayed as a character whose main demon is his liminality, caught in between several different cultures, a member of no club. This is typified by his impassioned monologue at Tony in which he asks, "If I'm not white enough, and I'm not black enough, and I'm not man enough, then tell me, Tony, what am I?" In this line we see that Don is caught between a number of identities, and feels that he measures up in none of them. His gayness makes him not man enough, his worldliness and musicianship makes him not black enough, and the color of his skin precludes him from belonging in the white community.
