Brother West (12 page)
Then why, right there on the streets of midtown Manhattan at three o’clock in the morning, did I black out?
I hadn’t been feeling faint.
Hadn’t been drinking. I don’t drug. I’d eaten sufficiently. And yet I was gone. When I came to, I saw that a group of late-night revelers were caring for me. Once again, good
Samaritans were seeing me through.
After a number of these dark episodes I went to the doctor. The man said, “I don’t see anything wrong with you. You’re just going too fast.”
I’d told him about the number of courses I was taking and my nonstop weekend trips out to see Mary Johnson in Massachusetts.
“I’ve always moved this fast,” I said.
“Well, it’s time to slow down.”
“I can’t.”
“You must.”
I didn’t.
I still haven’t.
I
WENT THROUGH GRADUATE SCHOOL
at Princeton in philosophy, still grappling with the questions, still racing through books and sociopolitical platforms, still searching and questioning, still unable to pinpoint the source of my blackouts. There was so much new light in my life coming from the knowledge of my professors. And yet the darkness did not abate.
Mary and I drifted apart. She was accepted into the London School of Economics where she would earn a master’s degree. Ironically, even before I had written my Ph.D. thesis, I had won a Du Bois Fellowship to study philosophy back at
Harvard. Mary and I were two ships passing in the night.
We would write. Occasionally we would speak by phone, but the distance did us in. By 1975, we were no longer a couple. Samuel Beckett said it best. His insight into the human effort to get things straight would follow me throughout life.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better
—that’s how Beckett saw it.
It’s a deep thought, and one that’s helped shed light on what happens when a relationship falls apart. Then there’s that Saint Augustine statement that keeps haunting me, the one that says that he’s a mystery to himself. I ain’t no saint, and my life sure hasn’t moved toward celibacy, but I relate to Augustine’s humility. I fell for Mary. I saw myself living the rest of my life with Mary. I was overwhelmed with the warm feelings that come with romance. I thought I had surrendered to those feelings, but maybe not. Maybe the circumstances of my life proved greater than my devotion.
At the time, Eddie Kendricks, former high tenor for the Temptations, sang a song that said it all for me: “Tell Her Love Has Felt the Need.” I remember playing it for Mary. In soaring falsetto, Eddie sang, “Tell her love has the felt to the need to leave her … I could never be what she wants of me.”
The song is heartbreakingly beautiful. Images abound: a woman is awoken at dawn, sunshine warms her face, the morning breeze blows her tears away. She dreams of a wedding, she dreams of children, she dreams of a home filled with love and a husband who never leaves her side. That’s the life she wants, the life she desires and deserves. In the words of the song, however, “But my life is like a ship that sails.”
M
Y LIFE HAD SAILED
.
I
had
received a calling so powerful it required obedience. I knew I had to keep reading, keep thinking, keep teaching in as many ways and in as many places as possible.
A formulation was taking shape in my mind and heart: that the centrality of vocation is predicated on finding one’s voice and putting forth a vision. All three are intertwined: vocation, voice, and vision.
I view vocation in stark contrast to mere profession. Vocation cuts deeper. I also contrast a voice with an echo. True voice doesn’t imitate or emulate prevailing paradigms. The notion, for example, of staying within restricted categories would never work for me. My voice, by its funky blues character, cuts across the disciplines.
The radical uniqueness and sheer singularity of voice are connected to the depths of our soul and the love that abides therein. In the greatest scene in the greatest play in English about love, Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
, Romeo approaches Juliet in the dark and gives voice to his soul, despite his despised name. Juliet replies, “My ears have not yet drunk a hundred words/Of thy tongue’s uttering, yet I know the sound.” Or as Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, those rhythm-and-blues love poets, would say, “I’d know you anywhere.”
As I reflect on the eternal art and sudden death of the incomparable Michael Jackson, it is clear that there are profound joys and unbearable sorrows that accompany being true to one’s calling. The comfort is in the knowing that by giving one’s heart and soul to uplift others through one’s art, one’s vocation, voice and vision are fulfilled. As a blues philosopher, Michael Jackson is my true soul brother.
Contrary to that unforgettable moment in line 607B of Book Ten in Plato’s
Republic
where philosophy quarrels with poetry, I believe philosophy must go to school with poetry and music. In short, like Nietzsche, we need dancing philosophers, Socrates with gaiety—poetic thinkers philosophizing under a funky groove.
I come from a blues people whose anthem is, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” The connection between unique vocality and empowering visionary practice is profound.
A vision is not a stare. A stare is flat. A vision is vital and vibrant. A vision is biblical: without a vision, people perish. Our job is to keep people from perishing.
My vision was surely based on my black Baptist foundation. It had everything to do with Jesus Christ’s mandate to love extravagantly and radically, but it also went in a dozen different directions. I didn’t see a precedent for this calling. I wanted the maximum degree Princeton had to offer, but I knew I wasn’t born to be a conventional professor. I believe in on-the-ground education. For years, I taught adult ed. And yet I knew those venues weren’t enough. I also taught in the prisons and churches and neighborhood schools.
I have found prisons to be both liberating and depressing institutions, where my soul is elevated and challenged. Be it at Sing Sing in New York, the city jail in Boston, the correctional facilities in Bordentown, NJ, or the juvenile detention center in Jamesburg, NJ, I am inspired when I speak and teach at those places where my brothers are incarcerated.
One of the most moving moments, I experienced during my teaching was when a prisoner simply asked me, “What was the source of hope for someone with a life sentence in prison?” I replied, “We all have a death sentence in space and time and there are many outside the prison walls whose hearts, minds, and souls are in profound and permanent bondage. So there is a sense in which a wise and courageous person can be free with a life sentence in prison, just as others can be unfree walking the streets of New York City. My fundamental aim is to touch the souls and unsettle the minds of people be they in prison, classroom, church, or on the block.”
During this time I began writing, but not in any traditionally academic way. And when I needed to find an expression of the complex romantic anguish I was facing, I turned not only to Brother Shakespeare, but also to Brother Eddie Kendricks who said, “Tell her love has felt the need to leave her.”
I knew what that meant, and I didn’t know what that meant. I knew that in leaving Mary
Johnson I had not stopped loving her. I love her to this day. Love of her led me to leave her. But some other kind of love, whose dimensions were beyond both description and comprehension, was fueling my feelings and moving me in directions that I hadn’t anticipated. I had found love. I had lost love. Love of my calling was pushing me on.
T
HEY CALL IT
ABD.
All But Dissertation. If it sounds like a disease or psychological disorder, well, dear brother or sister, that ain’t far from the truth. I suffered with ABD for years. I raced through my graduate work at Princeton with enthusiastic dedication. Philosophy was my meat and potatoes, and I was blessed a little later in this period to study with the greatest philosopher of the latter part of the twentieth century, Hans-Georg Gadamer. This brother was so heavy it was ridiculous. Lived through the hell of the Third Reich without supporting Nazism. Survived to write, among other major works,
Truth and Method
, one of the most profound books written in any language on any subject. The man lived to be 102. When he lectured, he never used a single note. Like a master jazz musician, he spun the words out of his spirit. He improvised magnificently. He was the Count Basie of philosophy. He was the architect of twentieth-century hermeneutics, a fancy word that refers to the ways we use to interpret texts, especially religious texts. His follow-up to
Truth and Method
was an examination of Paul Celan, the finest post–World War II poet in Europe, a Jew from what was then Romania. The follow-up blew the minds of Gadamer’s fellow philosophers. Philosophers just don’t knock out a complex work of theory and then devote a volume to understanding some poet. For traditional scholars, one doesn’t just follow the other. But Gadamer saw it was a continuum. To others, Gadamer’s leap seemed crazy. To me, it seemed right. I was doing some leaping of my own.
I was also leaping from philosophy to poetry. Truth was in metaphor, uncertainty, ambiguity, the beauty of the blues, words and thought mixed in the muddy waters of raging literary seas. I got back to Harvard as a philosophy graduate student, but I could never be a straight-up philosopher. I had been granted membership in the first class of Fellows of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute not for any distinguished academic work I had written, but because my former Harvard mentors, Martin Kilson and Preston Williams, used their power to get me in. They just liked me and figured I’d thrive in that environment. They were right, even if I found myself heading in a different direction.
The direction was toward literature. All I wanted to do was read novels, and Russian novels to boot. I started jonesing for every nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Russian novel ever written. Those were the bad boys who really understood the blues. They broke down the blues better than anyone. Talkin’ ’bout Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy—the heavy hitters who, from their strong moral base, wrote sagas about our tragic condition as people, the complexities of personality, the exploitations of society, and the scandalous intersection where indifferent history collides with human passions.
I didn’t want to write my Ph.D. dissertation. I wanted to write literature. I had a notion of realizing an intellectual performance that would sing like Sarah Vaughan and swing like Duke Ellington. In fact, it was during this time that I wrote a short story. I got the title from Earth, Wind & Fire. “Sing a Song” is a jazz-fused piece of fiction fixated on Duke’s death. (Ellington had died only a year earlier in 1974.)
It’s a barbershop-based story peopled with hustlers and pastors. It’s got the new music of the day—Teddy Pendergrass singin’ ’bout “Wake up ev’ybody, no more sleepin’ in bed…no more backward thinkin’…time for thinkin’ ahead”—and P-Funk screaming “We gonna turn this motha out!” It reflected my love of musical geniuses like Isaac Hayes, David Porter, Kenneth Gamble, and Leon Huff. It’s got the narrator going to a club where he paints a picture that had been burning in my mind for years: “People of all sizes and shades of the Negroid spectrum filled the misty, sweltering room. Flashing fluorescent multicolored lights shone just bright enough to see who was wearing what and who was with whom. The floor was filled with banana-skin females dancing with jet black men and chocolatecolored women dancing with paperbag-brown males.” This was a scene that Ernie Barnes would paint for the cover of Marvin Gaye’s
I Want You
. This was a story about the clash of generations, the young losing its connection with the best of the old, the old losing its connection with the fire of the young. The narrator, who was once a musician, was losing his hearing and had to make a vocational decision. Should he become a jazz intellectual in the world of ideas? He says, “Watching the vivacious dancers, I could see my former Self. There I was, fingerpopping and ass-twitching. But I also could see me now through my former Self. There I was, wall-flowering and analyzing.” The narrator is caught between the world of observing and the world of acting. Doing. Dancing. Singing a song.
At age twenty-two, I wanted to act on the stage of life. I still do. I wanted to do, and dance, and sing a simple song. The simple song was about death and rage and love and music and ideas of justice and freedom. The song had to include the distractions and disruptions but, to be effective, it had to be simple because the blues are simple. Yet, at the same time, as B.B. King, King of the Blues, once wrote, “The blues are a mystery, and mysteries are never as simple as they look.”
So here’s how my life looked in the mid- ’70s:
I was sad over breaking up with Mary, glad about being at Harvard, and, in spite of my usual eager get-ahead-get-the-degree attitude, getting nowhere on my dissertation. Those Russian novelists kept calling me. I even started a literary salon devoted to reading those texts. I had a crib on 888 Massachusetts Avenue where my partners and I discussed a different Russian novel every week. Man, was I obsessed! Didn’t want no English novels and didn’t want no German novels. Forget Proust and Joyce. Later for Cervantes and Victor Hugo. I’m not saying those writers didn’t turn out books we’ll be reading for centuries to come. But I just didn’t want to read them or re-read them in 1975. I had to have Turgenev every dang time. When it came to plays, my man was Anton Chekhov, whose understanding of the human condition is rivaled only by Shakespeare and Sophocles. Chekhov is the deep blues poet of catastrophe and compassion, whose stories lovingly depict everyday people wrestling with the steady ache of misery and yearning for a better life. As I grew older, only Franz Kafka inhabited the same literary stratosphere as Chekhov.
Others in our literary salon in Cambridge got tired of my Russian-only policy and made me stretch out. Ultimately we let in a little James Baldwin. We got to a little Ralph Ellison and we couldn’t ignore Brother Richard Wright. The only non-black non-Russian whose work we analyzed was Thomas Pynchon. We devoted a chunk of time to
The Crying of Lot 49
and
Gravity’s Rainbow
.
