Brother West (24 page)
Leaving Princeton wasn’t easy. I loved the institution and many of the beautiful people who taught and studied there. I was blessed, for example, to work with one of America’s finest playwrights and directors, my dear sister Emily Mann. She inspired me to work with the visionary Melanie Joseph, founder of the Foundry Theatre in New York. My Princeton connections were deep.
But on another level my Harvard connections were even deeper. Harvard, after all, was where my serious formal education had begun. My undergraduate years had shaped me. Harvard was where I found my voice as a student and began building my chops as a scholar. Those tumultuous ’70s, surrounded by spirits as inspiring as Martin Kilson and Preston Williams, were absolutely essential to everything I’d become. No doubt about it, Harvard was home. I accepted the position and signed up with the dream team.
A
FTER OUR MANY ADVENTURES IN
N
EW
H
AVEN
,
Tampa, Rockville, and Addis Ababa, Elleni and I yearned for a home. We found a magnificent house in Newton, Massachusetts that had been owned by the president of Brandeis University. We bought it, filled it with fine furniture, invited our friends and colleagues over for a housewarming, and thanked God for our blessed life. We were living large. Life was good.
Then, just as quickly, life turned frighteningly dangerous. Ever since the publication of
Race Matters
, my public profile had risen. I had appeared on many national TV shows. My arrival at Harvard was treated as major news in and around Boston, an area where bold progressivism and raw racism live side by side. My classes were so oversubscribed that we had to move to an off-campus auditorium to accommodate the students. In many ways, I felt deep appreciation and boundless love. In other ways, I felt out-and-out hatred. The manifestation of that hatred was a series of threats to my life. I’d get postcards and letters, phone calls at the office or at home.
“People are looking for you,” Skip told me one day on campus.
“What people?”
“Who knows, man. Crazy people. Haters. We’ve gotten reports from security. They want us to take your name off your office door and remove it from the faculty directory. That way you won’t be so easy to find.”
“If they want to find me,” I said, “they’ll find me.”
“I understand, brother,” said Skip, “but there’s no reason to make it easy for them.”
I agreed and had my name taken off the door and directory.
Later that semester, I was home in Newton, taking a shower in our upstairs bathroom, when I heard a blood-curdling scream. Grabbed a towel, ran downstairs to see Elleni pointing and yelling at a man running down the driveway.
My wife was hysterical. Through her tears I learned that a man wearing a mask had broken into the kitchen and put a gun with a silencer to her head. He wanted to know where I was. When she screamed, he ran off. We reported it to the police, but the police said there was little they could do without a detailed description.
Two weeks later, I was driving in from Cambridge when I spotted two guys sitting in a car in my driveway. One was holding a shotgun. Fortunately, Elleni wasn’t home. I wheeled around and sped right over to the Newton Police Station. The officers were nice folk, but they were Geritol brothers—old and tired and uninterested in my case. They said I better contact the FBI.
The FBI let me know that my name was on the list of all sorts of hate groups. They had their eye on many of them, but of course they had nothing close to twenty-four-hour surveillance. Tension mounted when I made a trip to the University of Utah to give a lecture. When I arrived, the local newspaper reported that I had been killed. Even the Harvard
Crimson
picked up the story. Maybe I’m wrong, but I didn’t detect much regret in their reporting. Mom had been called about the false reports and was frantic until I let her know that I was fine. When I got home to Newton, Elleni was a nervous wreck. What to do?
Elleni wasn’t about to stay at our house, not after what had happened. I understood her anxiety and felt obligated to protect her, emotionally and physically, from what was becoming an insane situation. Someone suggested that we move into the Four Seasons Hotel on Boylston Street in downtown Boston where security was tight. We did just that, leaving our big house in Newton to live in a fancy hotel condo. Naturally there was little not to love about living at the Four Seasons—the height of luxury and convenience—but the irony of this condition never quite left me. My success at broadcasting the need for a candid national conversation about race had resulted in my seeking shelter in the most privileged of sanctuaries. No matter. Elleni could enjoy some peace of mind, and that was most important to me.
During this crazy time, I did Pat Buchanan’s radio show. We battled it out, and afterward, in a friendly gesture, he invited me to lunch. I noticed he had no security.
“Brother Pat,” I said, “you mean to tell me with your right-wing anti-Semitic antics, you get no threats?”
“None, Professor,” he said. “Not one.”
“I’m surprised,” I said.
“Why is that?”
“Well,” I said, “I have no reputation of being anti anything, and I’m getting cards, letters, and calls from crazy folk practically every day. They showed up at my house and threatened my wife. I would have thought that you guys on the far Right, with that xenophobic overflow in your language and your vehement antiimmigrant stance, would be subjected to all sorts of threats.”
“It’s your image that turns you into such a target,” said Buchanan.
A little while later, a friend of mine also brought up the subject of my appearance. He argued that my looks only brought more attention to me, and in that sense could be construed as provocative. He was referring to the fact that I had stopped cutting my hair and had decided, on a daily basis, to wear a three-piece black suit, white dress shirt with gold cuff links, black tie, black scarf, black socks, and black shoes every day of my life. I had also refused to wear an overcoat or even carry an umbrella, regardless of the weather.
“You got the bushy Afro,” said my friend, “you got the formal attire with the gold watch chain coming out of the vest pocket. What’s the point? Why draw so much attention to yourself?”
My answer was simple: “As a free black man, I look the way I want to look and dress the way I want to dress.”
“When’s the last time you shaved?”
“Like my fellow bluesman Robert Johnson who is said to have bragged he never shaved, I, too, have never shaved in my life and it’s not a brag. I have never shaved in my life. Not once. I’m too busy to shave. If I had to get up every morning and shave my face, I’d give it all up and be homeless.”
“Seriously, what is the real meaning of your appearance?”
“The meaning’s deep and operates on lots of levels at once,” I told him. “First of all, I like the three-piece black suit and tie because I think it looks cool. It makes me feel cool and ready to face the world. Ready to teach, talk, read, listen, and alertly engage in the business set before me. My outfit gets me going and keeps me steady. It also reminds me of the dignity displayed by the regal bands of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, and also vocal groups like the Dramatics and Blue Magic. Naturally the look also refers to the ministers I loved so dearly in my lifetime, especially my beloved grandfather the Reverend Clifton L. West, and Shiloh Baptist’s beautiful pastor Willie P. Cooke, and the greatest of all living Christian preachers, Gardner C. Taylor.”
“But candidly, Corn, you also look something like an undertaker,” said my friend.
I laughed and agreed. “There’s something to that, dear brother,” I said. “Because the all-black outfit does have some visual reference to the fact that I live on the edge of the abyss. We all do. Like Chekhov’s mournful heroine Masha in his masterpiece, the play
The Three Sisters,
I believe we all struggle to persevere in the face of life’s ever-present deep disappointments. We live in a creative tension with catastrophe. Catastrophe is our constant neighbor. He lives next door, and he may be moving in at any moment. My outfit reminds me of that truth. We’re born to die, and the bluesman
,
who dances around the edges of disaster, must also be a righteous funeral director, directing his life in a way that never denies the certainty of a calamitous ending. I am a sad soul with a joyful disposition.”
To be a philosopher is both the most serious of vocations and the most playful of dispositions. Serious because the love of wisdom puts everything at stake in one’s thinking and living. Playful because even in one’s deepest moments one still might be wrong and therefore prone to a humbling laughter at oneself. There is a sense in which philosophy is the love of wisdom in the consciousness of folly.
The blues philosopher is the teller of the tales and the singer of the songs that keep alive the best of our historical legacies. Such inheritances sustain our courage to think critically about the past and act compassionately in the present and offer an alternative future. In this way, the bluesman descends from both the griot tradition and the prophetic tradition.
No true philosopher can avoid the subject of death. The subject had really never left my mind since those death shudders washed over me as a child. The examination of what my brother Cliff calls “the other side of time” has been a constant part of my thinking. To a large degree, though, that consideration has been an abstraction, a notion to consider from afar.
Then one day the abstract became real. On May 26, 1994, my dad died.
I
HEAR THE CRY OF
J
OHN
C
OLTRANE
.
I hear the heartbreaking moan of Billie Holiday and the anguished scream of James Brown. I feel the pain in Marvin Gaye’s soul when he cries, “Father, Father.” I am fortified by the faith of Dorothy Love Coates when she sings, “That’s Enough.” I see the tear in the voice of James Cleveland when he pleads, “Lord, Help Me to Hold Out.”
I needed help to hold out. I needed help to get through. I had been asked to give the eulogy at my father’s funeral, and I didn’t see how I could manage it. I was too torn up inside, too overwhelmed with grief and loss, too devastated, too down.
Back in 1959 when we were kids, Dad had suffered a near-fatal ulcer attack. Half his stomach had to be removed. But he bounced back like the fighter that he was, and we’d never heard another word about his health after that. In fact, he was the picture of health, filled with positive energy and a robust vitality. Only a few months before his passing, Dad and my sister Cynthia had come to hear me deliver a public lecture in Oakland. I cherished the moment when I proudly introduced them to the audience, pointing out how essential family had been to every aspect of my formation. Then in late April, Mom had called to say that Dad wasn’t feeling well and had agreed to see a doctor. That’s when we knew it was serious. Dad’s attitude about illness was simply to tough it out. I had daily reports about the tests they were giving him. His pain continued but the doctors were unable to say what was wrong. He went in for a battery of new studies at one hospital where, again, no specific disease was identified. That’s when he went to Kaiser. Cliff was there. Cliff was witness to what happened.
“On Tuesday, May 25, we took Dad to Kaiser,” Cliff remembered, “where they put him to sleep for a long probing procedure. When they brought him back to the room, he was still asleep. I was by his side when the doctor came in to say that Dad had pancreatic cancer, a fatal form of the disease. I stayed with him till midnight. Before I left, I prayed, ‘Dear God, don’t let this good man suffer.’ The next morning at five o’clock, the hospital called to say that Dad had passed. I couldn’t believe it. Mom couldn’t believe it. We rushed over there and ran into his room. Mom, usually the most composed of women, pounded on Dad’s chest, crying, ‘You’re still alive. I know you’re alive.’ He wasn’t. The doctor said he had died of a pulmonary embolism.
“I felt something wasn’t right. I didn’t understand what had happened. Dad’s sudden passing only hours after he was diagnosed with the fatal disease was never explained to my satisfaction. He was only sixty-five.”
My father’s death changed everything. It had me looking at the world through a whole different center. It made me acutely aware of an obvious fact that had never been an active part of my emotional reality: the things we prize most highly and the people we love most deeply can be lost in an instant. My presumption— which is to say, the presumption of a child—was that Dad would always be there. I’d call him like I’d always called him. It could be a Monday morning or Saturday night.
“Dad,” I’d say, “just checking in. Just calling to say how much I miss you and Mom.”
Then that voice would come on the line, the voice I’d heard my entire life, the voice of comfort and reassurance, the voice of calmness and unquestioned integrity. My dad’s voice would say, “Son, we miss you too. Mom and I were just talking about how proud you make us. We were just saying how much we love you.”
“I love you too, Dad.”
And that would be it. A conversation no longer than a minute, but a conversation strong enough to get me through another few days, until the next conversation, and the one after that. In my little-boy way, I never doubted that these conversations would go on forever. Dad would outlive me. Dad would outlive everyone. Dad would defy death because … well, Dad was Dad.
Mr. Cool.
Mr. I’m-There-for-My-Kids.
Mr. Lean-on-Me.
But now Dad was gone, and I didn’t see how I could express the terrible grief and pain assaulting me. I didn’t know what to say.
Somehow, though, I got up before the assembled group of friends and family at church and managed to speak my heart. I spoke about how I took Dad’s ever-constant presence for granted. I said that I felt most human and vulnerable standing before the deceased body of this wonderful man whom I love so completely.
“This is when we find out what we are about on the deepest level. We have no choice but to live with this loss, to absorb this terrible blow and see if the wound it inflicts upon our soul can move us to love with even greater purpose and energy.” I spoke about the despair I felt at never being able to see, hear, or embrace my father again. And then I said, “Because he was strong, I know he wants us to carry on with strength. He believed in strength, not manly, macho strength, but strength of the spirit that resists shutting down in the face of disaster. In the aftermath of Dad’s passing, I could easily shut down. I could give in to the melancholia that wants to envelop me. I could be paralyzed. I could break down. But Dad’s spirit was—and is and forever will be—an active spirit, one that says, ‘Go on. Move on. Do what needs to be done. Care for those who require care. Spread love wherever you walk. Spread love whenever you talk.’”
