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Friday
This is the latest post in my on-going series on “My Life in Literature,” which appears every Friday. My inspiration is an informal autobiography written by my great grandmother, Eliza Scott, who was raised on the Lord Bunbury estate in Barton, England (her father Thomas was the estate manager) and ended up in Evanston, Illinois. In her memoir she talks about the novels that were important to her as she grew up, and I figured I should do something similar for family members who come after me. Of course, the subject is also consistent with the mission of this blog, which is to explore the many ways that literature enhances and sometimes changes our lives.
I’ve reached the point in my memoir where I must grapple with the issue of racism. While not as painful to contemplate as it is to experience, it still makes me uncomfortable. That’s in part because I have within two warring impulses, the desire to please people and the need to take principled stands. This has meant accommodating myself to people who, in my childhood, supported segregation and who, in my Tennessee retirement, still harbor racist beliefs. I feel torn between my mother’s urge to play nice and my father’s desire to confront, so that I never feel on solid ground. This internal discomfort has occasionally caused me to shy away from addressing racial issues, which I then regard as cowardice and take them on anyway.
As I’ve mentioned, I attended Carleton College in part because I was fleeing southern racism. It turns out that I wasn’t prepared for what I got. Suddenly no one was talking about Martin Luther King’s non-violent resistance, which I had heard him espouse two years before. (“Therefore I say, not ‘Burn, baby, burn, but build baby build!” he said defensively in a Charleston speech at which I was present.) My rightwing high school history teacher, in response to King’s assassination a year later, had declared, “He lived by the sword and died by the sword,” but at Carleton in 1969 people were talking about him as though he had been an Uncle Tom. Instead, I encountered only Black militant writers. We were assigned to read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice for freshman orientation and The Autobiography of Malcolm X and George Jackson’s Soledad Brother for Government 101, taught by future senator Paul Wellstone.
Just think, we could have been assigned more moderate voices, like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Looking back, I realize that liberals lost our bearings as we attempted to negotiate post-Jim Crow America. In the confusion, the loudest and angriest voices seized center stage. In Soul on Ice, which I now realize is the kind of book one might expect from a rapist who is full of himself, I saw Carleton telling me to take seriously a man who recounted, with relish, stories of rich white men hiring Black men to make love to their wives. (The stories were a way of elevating his claims to potency while emasculating whites.) Some Black militants at the time excoriated liberals like me as being no better than Klan members, even as conservatives like Tom Wolfe mocked us for “radical chic.” Battered from both sides, it seemed better just to keep one’s head down.
Only I couldn’t do that either. I’ve mentioned how, when working as a journalist after graduation, my features on prominent local Black figures were suppressed by my newspaper. More positive was the year I spent teaching at HBCU Morehouse College after receiving my PhD.
1981-82 was an exciting year to be in Atlanta. The city had its first Black mayor in Maynard Jackson, and Atlanta was billing itself as “the city too busy to hate” (which wasn’t true—there was still a lot of hate). Each week we had a noteworthy speaker at the school—Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, even Baldwin himself (!!)—and I learned that any generalizations I had about African Americans had to be jettisoned.
The year itself is a blur now, given that I was also a new father and a new homeowner. (Julia and I bought a house in a multiracial neighborhood.) In the humanities sequence I taught at Morehouse, however, I remember one work clearly. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, challenging though it is, got my students’ full attention.
Invisible Man opens with a student having to endure public humiliation in order to get a scholarship to attend an HBCU (one based on Tuskegee Institute in Alabama). Then the Institute itself comes up short, as does every other institution that the narrator encounters. Time after time he is rendered invisible by the agendas of those who interact with him, and to this can be added his own confusion about his identity. Who is he anyway? The novel hit a responsive chord in my students, who recognized in the narrator their own identity struggles.
As an aside I note that, decades later when St. Mary’s College of Maryland had its first Black president, she referenced Invisible Man in her inaugural address. She too knew what invisibility was and applied the analogy to the college and well as to herself. Although St. Mary’s is ranked among the nation’s top public liberal arts colleges, it was not seen as she wanted it to be seen.
I left Morehouse for St. Mary’s because it offered me a wider range of classes to teach, as well as more money and more job security. Still, I didn’t feel good going to a school with so few Black students. Fortunately, Maryland colleges and universities were under an order to rectify the evils of past segregation by increasing their minority enrollments. The effort paid off as our minority population grew to match the state’s demographics, and I got to know a number of the Black students through the Minority Literature classes I began teaching.
The courses were the most vibrant but also the most contentious that I’ve taught. I had the students read Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Toni Morison, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and others, and students often used the works to process race issues they had encountered. I discovered that, more than anything else, my Black students wanted race not to be an issue in their lives. Their second desire was, since they couldn’t have their first wish, that there be open and honest discussions about race.
I wasn’t the ideal person to teach the course—I was doing so because I perceived a need—and we would later hire Jeff Coleman, a specialist in African American literature as well as a fine poet. Jeff’s Minority Lit class featured one approach I wished I’d taken. He’d begin with an American author of an ethnicity that was foreign to everyone in the class (say, a Korean-American or Native American author). That way, everyone was at the same disadvantage—no one could claim expertise and no one is put in a position of having to be the spokesperson for his or her race. The insights that emerged could then be applied to African American authors.
If I had taught this way, I suspect my class would have had fewer battles, with white students feeling less attacked and Black students feeling less misunderstood.
I close with one final episode which I’ve referred to multiple times here on this blog. One Black student created a stir when she wore a t-shirt with the words, “South Africa—It’s a Black thing, you wouldn’t understand.” White students objected, letters to the student newspaper flew back and forth, and (sensing an educational opportunity) someone organized a panel. I was invited to participate, along with the student, one of her critics, and an African American professor.
I can’t remember what I said—probably I made a plea for respectful dialogue—but I can report what Lucille Clifton heard me saying. The noted African American poet was in the audience (later she would become a colleague), and she wrote the following poem, later published in her collection quilting. Here it is:
note to my self
it’s a black thing you wouldn’t understand
(t-shirt)amira baraka—I refuse to be judged by white men.
or defined. and i see
that even the best believe
they have that right,
believe that
what they say i mean
is what i mean
as if words only matter in the world they know,
as if when i choose words
i must choose those
that they can live with
even if something inside me
cannot live,
as if my story is
so trivial
we can forget together,
as if i am not scarred,
as if my family enemy
does not look like them,
as if i have not reached
across our history to touch,
to soothe on more than one
occasion
and will again,
although the merely human
is denied me still
and i am now no longer beast
but saint
How do I know that Lucille had me in mind when she wrote “even the best”? Because years later, after I had taught the poem multiple times, I asked her directly and she confirmed it. Essentially she is accusing me of feeling entitled to restate what the student is saying and doing so without questioning my right to do so. In the process, whitesplaining, not listening, which is a not uncommon failing amongst white guys.
And what about wanting her to choose words that I could live with? Well, it’s true that I was rendered uncomfortable by her t-shirt, and Lucille probably sensed my discomfort, even if I didn’t express it directly. Something deep within her rebelled against my restatement, so much so that she felt suffocated.
I think I was innocent of wanting to “forget together” past racial injustice. But it is true that I was not as focused on racial injustice as the student and Lucille were, so in a way I did trivialize their stories and overlook their scars.
It’s a fact that most of us, even the best intentioned, still carry prejudice within us. Rather than flagellating ourselves for not being perfect, however, we can reflect on our failings and seek to grow. Life, I have discovered over the decades, is far more interesting when we do so. When we acknowledge human complexity, it’s as though the world goes from black and white to technicolor. We see new dimensions in the people we encounter and in ourselves, and our time on earth becomes infinitely fascinating.
Oh, and one of the best ways to grow into complexity is to immerse yourself in the extraordinary range of works by African American authors. A list of ten favorites, in no particular order, are Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Beloved, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Lucille Clifton’s Blessing the Boats, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, Langston Hughes’s Collected Poems, and Gwendolyn Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville. And that’s just for starters.
