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Authors: Cornel West

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BOOK: Brother West
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I was barely a teen. I was committed, like Brother Cliff, to becoming a champion runner. I was swept up by the Shiloh Baptist sermons of Reverend Cooke. I was swept up by the sounds of Jr. Walker’s “Shotgun.” I was slow-dancing with the girls to Barbara Mason’s “Yes, I’m Ready” and Smokey Robinson’s “Choosey Beggar.” In fact, some of the girls told me I looked a little like Smokey. I was also into Arthur Schopenhauer, the German thinker born 220 years ago who said that art was more important than reason or logic in understanding life. Man, I related. I knew that Marvin Gaye’s “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” was more than just a song. When the Impressions sang about “Keep on Pushing” and “People Get Ready,” their words, like Schopenhauer’s or Kierkegaard’s, resonated deep within me. When Mom and Dad had taken us to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. speak at Sacramento’s Memorial Auditorium—that was back in 1963 when I was ten—I was spellbound. I felt him. I felt
it
. I felt the rhythm of righteous speech. He was, like a song, pushing us on.

Early at Will C. Wood Junior High, the teachers were pushing me on. While I made the varsity baseball team as a seventh grader and won the Inspirational Trophy in football, I also was reading biographies of Albert Einstein and fell in love with the fact that, for all his scientific brilliance, he played the violin. Just for the heck of it, I started writing books. At twelve, I wrote a 250-page history of Canada. At thirteen, I wrote a 180-page history of Mexico City. These were not books of any insight or analysis. They were simple accumulations of facts placed in chronological order and rendered in storytelling form.

I was running, running, running.

“You were running so hard,” Cliff recently reminded me, “that you once got into my stash. I’m not sure I was such a good role model for you, Corn. I might have had Dad’s cool, but Dad never used his cool to seduce women. He was a one-woman man. He knew about what the psychologists would later call ‘healthy boundaries.’ But man, I used that cool for all it was worth. And it was worth a lot of girls. They dug that cool. Fact is, there were several girlfriends I was juggling at the same time when, out of nowhere, still another one popped up. We’ll call her ‘V.’ I said, ‘Corn, if V calls, tell her I’m not home.’ Sure enough, V called and you gave her my message. But then you started chatting her up. Next thing I know, bro, you’re going out with V!”

“But no, Cliff. That happened only after you broke up with her.”

V was definitely ghetto fabulous.

C
OACH
B
ILL
M
AHAN LOVED THE
West brothers. He was our biggest booster and our cross country coach. When Dad couldn’t take us running, Coach would show up at six am and take us on ten-mile treks. Coach had gone to Stanford, where he earned a master’s degree in history. He was a progressive white brother. At one point, he gave me Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle,
a novel that introduced me to the horrors suffered by workers exploited by unchecked capitalism. Coach and I discussed it for days.

“Here’s another book,” he said, giving me
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. “You’ll hate it, Corn, but I think it’s important that you read it.”

I didn’t hate it.

“Why not?” asked Coach. “I was sure you’d hate the stereotypes.”

“I saw Tom as somehow trying to be Christ-like,” I said.

Recognizing my voracious appetite for the written word, Coach gave me books far beyond my reading grade level, such as the renowned American historian Richard Hofstadter, who wrote about anti-intellectualism from a subtle progressive perspective. A lifetime later, my first public lecture would take place in the classroom of Coach Mahan—turned Professor Mahan—at Sacramento City College. The topic? Hofstadter’s classic treatment of anti-intellectualism.

Back when I was still a kid, Coach was also determined to teach me how to swim.

“It’ll increase your strength,” Coach said, “and help your stamina when you run. There’s a swimming pool in the apartment complex where I live. We can practice there.”

When we arrived, the pool was being used by a half-dozen white people. I didn’t pay them any mind. I was dead-set on learning to swim. But the moment Coach and I got in the pool, every last swimmer got out. I mean, those folks fled! I looked at Coach and Coach looked at me. I didn’t understand it. I had showered that morning and brushed my teeth. What was going on here? No matter. Coach gave me my lesson, and an hour later we got out. While we were leaving, maintenance arrived and began to drain the pool.

“Why are you doing this?” Coach asked indignantly.

“The manager just told me to clean out the pool.”

“Is this when you usually do it?”

“No. It’s not due for a draining for another week.”

“Did the manager tell you to wait to drain until after we got out?”

“Yes.”

With that, Coach went in and told the manager that he was moving out of the complex. “You hurt me,” he told the manager, “and you hurt my student. You should hang your head in shame.”

NEGATIVE CAPABILITY

I
HAVE A LIFELONG LOVE
for John Keats, the greatest of the English Romantic poets who lived during the nineteenth century. His uncanny ability to create beauty with words touched my soul. I was still quite young when I read the letter Keats sent to his brother in 1817. In it, he wrote about “negative capability,” which he explained as the quality “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I was drawn to this idea because so much of what I experienced as a kid, teen, and young man seemed shrouded in mystery.

Even the basic story that had been passed down from my grandparents to my parents to me was clearly mysterious. If I read a biography, for example, of Theodore Roosevelt, I was told where he was and what he did every year of his life. But the four biblical accounts of Jesus’s life don’t do that. The narrative is sketchy, the vast majority of his growing-up years undocumented. At times, Jesus expresses uncertainties and doubts. In the Garden of Gethsemane he falls to the ground and wants to know if God will let him out of this jam. On the cross, he cries out that worrying blues line, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

None of this made me challenge the power of Christ-based love. I lived with people who modeled that love—my mom, my dad, my brother, my sisters, my grandparents, my preacher. They modeled humility. In their own way, they washed the feet of those they served, just as Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. But at this critical juncture in my life I also knew what Keats was talking about. If Jesus Christ could express his uncertainties and doubts, then the English poet was pointing me in the right direction. I didn’t have to resolve every contradiction or inconsistency. When I read the poetry of Walt Whitman, I could understand why he answered the question, “Do I contradict myself?” with “Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Because I was considered precocious, I was asked to deliver sermons during the junior church service. I tried to avoid it, not because I felt incapable, but because it meant missing a sermon by our pastor, Willie P. Cooke. Cooke was not bombastic, although he would have Holy Ghost visitations during his sermons. He was not intellectual. He was sincere. He loved to talk about the litany of love. He started each sermon by quoting Psalm: 121 “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord.” Later in my life, when I began speaking in churches, I followed his lead and started with those same wonderful words. He was a man of deep discernment and genuine charity. He was humble. He wasn’t interested in hellfire and he wasn’t interested in self-aggrandizement. It seemed right that he was a carpenter as well as a preacher. The only other preacher who came close to Reverend Cooke’s depth of spirit was Reverend Dr. J. Alfred Smith, the renowned pastor of Allen Temple Baptist Church of Oakland, California. As an adult, I’ve been blessed to speak and preach many times in his church.

Back in my childhood, I remember that my first sermon in junior church focused on Jesus as the “water of life.” I took it from John 4:14. I worked it hard. I compared the pure water of Christ to Kool-Aid—one can sustain you, the other can’t. The congregation got to rocking and I got to rocking even harder. If my desire to hear Reverend Cooke hadn’t been so keen, I’m sure I would have worked up more sermons. I had some rhetorical gifts and I liked the inspiration it gave to others. But I have never received the calling to preach. I am neither licensed nor ordained as a minister. I see it as a sign of God’s wisdom that I was never chosen to be a pastor. I have tremendous respect for that calling. But I know that, as a preacher, I would fall far short of the mark. Ironically, many people do believe that I’m a Christian minister simply because I speak in a preacherly style. But the simple truth is that I’m a Christian bluesman in the life of the mind and a Christian jazzman in the world of ideas.

As a child, Cooke’s beautiful soul kept calling me. I also loved the way he called on the deacons to serve the parishioners. Deacon Hinton was our designated mentor. He was childless and treated me and Cliff like sons. Lord, this man was a loving soul! He was a chauffeur who drove for white folks. Every summer he’d make sure to take me and Cliff to the picnics put on by his rich employers. We were the only blacks in attendance. It was like something out of
The Great Gatsby
, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel about social yearning and spiritual malnutrition. Strangely enough, though, Cliff and I didn’t do a lot of yearning. We were too happy running around the great manicured lawns and gardens of the wealthy. We won all the foot races. Played ball with the kids. Asked if we could borrow their mitts. “Hey, man,” we’d say, “nice glove you have here. Mind if I use it?” “No, go ahead.” It was an easy rapport. Deacon Hinton carried us to these picnics every year of our childhood. We developed friendships and allowed the social graciousness of the occasion to wash over us. And I believe that we, being the children of Irene and Clifton West, brought some social graciousness of our own.

S
OME OF THE RESIDENTS OF
F
LORIN
,
a white district on the other side of Glen Elder, were not especially gracious. Between our neighborhood and Florin was Black Hills, a large landscape of open fields overrun by weeds. Black Hills was the demilitarized zone. Mom and Dad, for example, never ventured into the area while Cliff and I fearlessly charged full steam ahead. We liked Black Hills because it was raw and wild and rabbits ran free. We’d take our BB guns and our dog and hunt down the hares. Didn’t matter to us when we got close to Florin. But to some folk it mattered a lot. When one white man spotted us, he sicced his ferocious Rottweiler on our mutt. When we tried to rescue our dog, the guy pulled out a gun and told us to stay put. Somehow our dog escaped, and so did we. Cliff and I might have been able to take the guy, but we were too smart to challenge his pistol. A week later, though, when our dog was healed, we went right back into Black Hills, figuring it was just as much our territory as anyone else’s.

Yet the real racial integration of my school life didn’t happen till junior high. I was placed in advanced classes, just as Cliff had been. And just like Cliff, I was often the only black student in the college placement classes. Cliff was a school leader and became president of the student body. Three years after Cliff, I was elected to the same office. Naturally that meant we were able to win over white kids, since whites comprised the vast majority of the student population. I was voted Most Likely to Succeed, Best Scholar, and Most Popular.

I
N
1967,
WHEN
I
WAS FOURTEEN
,
Mom and Dad made a big decision. They saw a house that they liked in South Land Park, an all-white middle-class suburb, and decided to buy it. We would be the first blacks in the neighborhood. The home represented an upgrade. It gave us more space and was located on a quiet street. Cliff, my sisters, and I were excited—though we hated to leave Glen Elder. It was something nicer than what we were used to, and we were up for the adventurous move.

The adventure got ugly.

When the white neighbors heard that we were coming, they panicked. They decided to stop us, as in Lorraine Hansberry’s classic play,
A Raisin in the Sun
. They had a series of meetings in which they concluded that the only way to keep us away was to pool their money and buy the house out from under us. But Mom and Dad were organized and efficient professionals. They had made certain that the mortgage papers were in order, the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed. The house was ours. When the neighbors saw that the financial tactics wouldn’t work, they got down and dirty. They went to threats. Nasty notes in the mailbox. Ugly phone calls.

Dad reacted in typical Dad fashion. He didn’t answer their name-calling with names of his own. He didn’t threaten them back. He didn’t get a gang of his friends together and come back with a show of force. He simply put on his coat and tie and began going door to door to all our neighbors. He’d knock politely and when the resident responded, he said, “Just want to introduce myself. I’m Cliff West, and my wife and I, along with our four kids, have moved into that house just down the street. We’re hardworking folks and are pleased to be able to live in such a nice part of town. We intend to be good neighbors, and I want you to know if there’s anything that we can do for you, all you have to do is ask. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

The neighbors were disarmed. Dad’s kindness would unnerve the unkindest person around. The threats and the ugly calls stopped, but that didn’t mean that we were given welcome baskets and warm apple pies. We hardly heard a “good morning.” Rarely did we see a friendly smile. The vibe was cold as ice.

“Don’t matter,” said Dad. “We’re here to stay. Let the people react however they react.”

One man, though, reacted with love. His name was Tom Hobday. He was a white brother—I call him the John Brown of our neighborhood—who immediately saw that the West family was up to good. He befriended Dad. When it was time for the Golden West Track Meet, Mr. Hobday extended us a personal invitation.

BOOK: Brother West
12.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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