Brother West (11 page)

That night, after the dance, I walked her back to her dorm. She asked me what courses I was going to take in this, my junior year.

“I’m going to take eight courses each semester so I can graduate a year early.”

“That’s crazy,” she said. “I’ve never heard of that.”

“Harvard hasn’t either, but I’ve got to do it. My sister’s going off to college and Mom and Dad are running out of money. If I graduate early with high grades, I can get a full scholarship to graduate school. That way next year will be free.”

“And Harvard is letting you do this?” asked Mary.

“At first they said no. As a philosophy major, I’d be required to take a year-long junior colloquial
and
a year-long senior colloquial. Those couldn’t be squeezed into two semesters. But as it turns out, I’ve taken most of the courses required for a major in Near Eastern Languages and Literature—Hebrew, Aramaic, Mesopotamian thought. So I’ve switched majors. This year all I have to do is take sixteen courses and write a thesis in Near Eastern Languages and Literature.”

“That’s all
?
”
Mary laughed.

“That’s all,” I assured her. “In my heart, I’m a philosophy major. That’s my fundamental intellectual identity.”

“How can you be accepted into a graduate philosophy program if you’re not a philosophy major?”

“That worries me, but maybe they’ll take me anyway.”

“Just because you’re cute?” she asked slyly.

“No, but by then I’ll have a cute girlfriend, and she’ll be able to convince them of my worth.”

“Really, Cornel, how are you going to pull it off?”

“I really don’t know.”

“So you’re making it up as you go along,” said Mary.

“A bluesman in training,” I said. “We’re moving through any way we can.”

T
HAT WAS THE YEAR
I
FELL
for Mary Johnson, fell in love so completely I hardly knew what hit me. I loved falling in love and the feelings it gave me. I loved loving a woman as strong and determined as Mary, loved seeing her absorb everything Harvard had to offer, loved having an intellectual companion and a lover who liked James Brown almost as much I did. Life reached a new level of happiness. I took the sixteen courses in those two semesters and passed with flying colors. I knew I had to keep moving so I applied to Princeton’s Ph.D. program in philosophy—then considered the best in the world—and was accepted on a full scholarship.

There’s one moment in that final undergraduate year that I’ll never forget: I was all set to go out and see Al Green at a nightclub in downtown Boston. He was hot as he could be with “Tired of Being Alone” and “Let’s Stay Together.” There’s no way I was going to miss my favorite soul balladeer. On my way out of the door, though, I just happened to flip open the first page of a book I’d picked up earlier in the day. It was
Wittgenstein’s Vienna
by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, a depiction of the cultural world of Ludwig Wittgenstein that included classical composers Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler, and historical sociologist Max Weber. It wasn’t that I forgot about Brother Al—no one could ever forget Brother Al—but this dang book was absolutely riveting. I tried to stop reading, but couldn’t. Wittgenstein’s courage and genius got to the core of who I was and wanted to be. I never did get to Al Green’s show, but Wittgenstein’s performance in the text was astounding.

W
HEN
I
GRADUATED MAGNA CUM LAUDE
in three years, the Sacramento paper ran a long article on me with a big picture. They went over to interview Dad. They told him they needed thirty minutes to ask a battery of questions about how he had raised his children. But Dad being Dad broke it down beautifully. He said, “I don’t need thirty minutes. Fact is, I don’t even need one minute. I can give you the answer in four words.
Be there for them
. Give your children all the time they need.”

“That’s it?” asked the reporter.

“That’s it,” said Dad. “
Be there for them
.”

And he was. He always was.

DAVID HUME AND
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER IN
THE BROOKLYN NAVY YARD

I
WAS KNEE-DEEP SURE-ENOUGH
all-the-way in love. Mary Johnson had won my heart. I had won hers. We were so tight that the summer after ’d graduated, she invited me to live in her family house in Springfield Gardens, a quiet section of Queens. Her Dad, who had traveled the world, liked me. He saw me as his potential son-in-law and hooked me up with a desk job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I did the clerical work assigned to me each day in a hurry, giving me enough time to study and concentrate on the two figures who were saying the most to me: Schopenhauer and Hume. The two men were linked: Schopenhauer, the only great German philosopher who could read English, actually wrote a long introduction to Hume’s philosophy. Of course I’d been reading Schopenhauer since childhood—Schopenhauer who put will over reason and mystery over fact; Schopenhauer who dealt so profoundly with the questions of sadness and sorrow. I kept his essays and aphorisms under my pillow.

That summer I found myself writing little Schopenhauer-styled notes to myself. “What’s the point of living?” “Why not see what nonexistence is all about?” “When this consciousness ends, what does the new consciousness look like?” “Do I dare step into the void?” “Is there a void?” I
didn’t fall into depression. I was happy with Mary and eager to
get to graduate school. There was no reason to be depressed. And yet
these thoughts of nonexistence rattled through my daily thoughts.

These were not suicidal thoughts as is
normally understood— the usual despair that accompanies that
state of mind was not present. No, it was nothing on par with the
mental health crises that others have faced. Rather, I was curious to
see whether, when these lights go out, other lights come on. I’d been entertaining these thoughts since I was a kid back in Sacramento. But the thoughts never turned into action because of a singular insight: The thoughts were narcissistic. They involved only me and my philosophical query. I thought of the people I would hurt—Mom and Dad, Cliff and Cynthia and Cheryl. Mary would be devastated. So would my friends. So I stopped the notes and put away Schopenhauer. But not for long. To this day, Schopenhauer remains one
of my closest companions.

David Hume became an even closer companion. Hume’s still my man. Gotta teach a course on him at least once every two years. Gotta have his books by my bedside. Gotta keep reading the brother. He is the finest philosophic mind in the English language. Back in the summer of 1973, I was preparing for an oral exam at Princeton in September.
Even though they had admitted fourteen of us to the graduate program, they reserved the right to weed out four or five if we didn’t do our summer preparation. That meant choosing one legendary philosopher and not only absorbing his entire work, but all the scholarship on him as well. Hume was my choice cause there’s no one like him.

Hume was a Scottish genius who lived in the eighteenth century. I started out with his
A Treatise of Human Nature
, written when he was in his late twenties. At twenty-seven, he had a nervous breakdown. I related to his intensity and eagerness to know. He put down religion. He even put down conventional knowledge. He said, “Reason is, and only ought to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” He was an iconoclast who questioned fearlessly. His book,
Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion,
published after his death, is the most profound critique of any religious faith. His atheism challenged my faith but never destroyed it. He understood dread—he himself had experienced the death shudder. David Hume was a soul brother.

Mary Johnson was a soul sister. I was so head-over-heels that one Sunday afternoon I invited her to ride the subway into Manhattan with me.

“Where we going?” she asked.

“You’ll see, baby,” I said.

I waltzed her into St.
Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, dropped to my knees, presented her with a ring and said the words for the first time in my life (though, I hasten to add, not the last): “Will you marry me?”

The lady smiled and said yes.

It was August. That was the summer Sylvia had her “Pillow Talk,” Marvin was telling us, “Let’s Get It On,” and Gladys and her Pips were saying, “Neither One of Us Wants to Be the First to Say
Goodbye.” It was a romantic time, a sexy time. I had found love and love was going to last.

“This is it,” I said to Cliff over the long-distance line. “I asked and she accepted.”

“Congratulations, my brother,” said Cliff. “Sure you ain’t moving too fast?”

“Wanna move even faster,” I said, thinking of graduate school coming up and wondering how many courses I could take. Reading over the list, I wanted to take’em all.

W
E
OPERATE ON DIFFERENT TRACKS
at the same time. New experiences energize us. New possibilities excite us. Fresh romance warms our hearts, thrills our imagination, animates our dreams. These are the positive blessings of a life fueled by love. Yet our essential duality can never be denied. Christians consider Jesus
Christ the most divine creation to ever walk the earth. Yet his full divinity coexisted with his full humanity. At times he doubted, at times he cried, at times he felt abandoned, alone, even traumatized.

I entered graduate school a blessed man. Arriving at Harvard with less than a superior high school education, I caught up, caught on, studied hard, and graduated in three years. I got into Princeton, where I was fortunate enough to have Londoner David Lumsden, an extraordinary philosopher, as my roommate. My dear brother Eugene Rivers was a frequent visitor.
My fiancée back in Cambridge was everything I had ever wished for in a woman. I was so crazy for Mary Johnson that I did not spend a single weekend in Princeton. (If truth be known, even today, as I long to enjoy the beauty and idyllic pleasures of my New Jersey community, I’m a bluesman and have yet to spend one single weekend at home.)

Every Thursday morning, I’d catch the bus for New York City and at the Port
Authority Terminal would change buses for Boston. I was teaching a course at an adult education school that was stimulating. I was taking courses that were stimulating. I was running around in my usual manner, up half the night reading books, making notes, writing papers. You’d look at me back then and say, “This brother’s on the go. This brother’s got energy to spare.
He’s moving fast, he gives out positive vibes.”
You’d be right, but you’d also be unable to explain why, in this very same period, I experienced a series of blackouts that seemed to indicate that, beneath the surface, darkness loomed.

Several of these blackouts came at or around the Port Authority Bus Terminal in midtown Manhattan. One time
I found myself flat on my face on Forty-second Street. I had no idea what happened. Afterward, I thought of the wonderful line spoken by
Blanche DuBois, the American Hamlet, in
A Streetcar Named
Desire
, that masterpiece by the white literary bluesman Tennessee
Williams: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Were it not for strangers who picked me up and helped me to the first-aid station, I could have easily been robbed, beaten, or left for garbage. This was, after all, a time when the crime rate was out of control and the city was swimming in squalor.

Another time I blacked out on the bus itself. When I came to, I found myself being attended to by an older white woman who, with the help of two men, had picked me up off the floor of the aisle where I had collapsed, gathered up all my books and placed a wet towel on my brow.

“You must be quite an accomplished young man to be reading books of this caliber,” she said, pointing to those thick philosophical tomes I carried with me. “But you best see a doctor and have a thorough checkup.”

Doctors and checkups have never been high on my priority list. In fact, since high school I haven’t engaged in a single athletic activity. I haven’t once set foot in a gym. I say that not out of arrogance. Obviously, exercise is vital. As with everyone, exercise would do me good. But my absorption into the life of the mind, together with a commitment to political action, has been so complete that I’ve eschewed such training.

During graduate school, I got my workouts on the dance floor. You’d find me at the discos. This was the grand period of Parliament, who had transmogrified from Funkadelic and was tearing it up with “Up for the Downstroke” and
“Chocolate City.” Later, of course, the funk got thicker with “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker),” and “Flash Light,” not to mention the ethereal Aqua
Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop).” I hadn’t lost my love of dancing first triggered by Mrs. Reed, our Sacramento neighbor whose devotion to early Motown got me spinning like a top.

This was also the glorious period of the Maestro, Barry White, whose soaring orchestral flights of fancy were anchored by deepbottom grooves that had us half-crazy.
“Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up,” the Maestro declared.
“Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe,” he swore.
“Let the Music Play.” As the music played, as I danced my existential blues away, as I lost thoughts of entangled philosophical systems, I found myself at one with pure motion. Barry elevated the funk—gave sheen to the funk—without abandoning the funk.
That was his artistic mission. He understood on the deepest level that the funk can be a springboard for beauty. Funk faces brutal reality and reflects its raw consequences. But in doing so, funk is transformational, even redemptive. Funk is liberating. In the funky dance, we express outrage at our human (and political and economic and social) condition, even as we transcend it, even as we get high-up on something low-down, even as we celebrate the catastrophic human condition—which is to say, the certain death of the flesh—by following the mantra first set down by Funkadelic:
“Free your mind and your ass will follow.”

And yet after a long evening of such freedom, after a super-stimulating night at a New York City disco where Archie Bell and the Drells’ “I Can’t Stop
Dancing” and “Tighten Up” had me whirling and The
Main Ingredient’s “Spinning Around (I Must Be Falling in
Love)” and “Everybody Plays the Fool” had me grinding, I left the disco feeling fine.