Black Folk Could Fly, page 15
I was a college student in 1982, the year Richard Pryor released the concert film Live on the Sunset Strip. This was his first film since his ill-fated freebasing accident of a few years before. Pryor had been, and still is, acknowledged as the King of Comedy, the one after whom everything changed. He had squeezed more juice out of a single word than a Minute Maid factory could from an entire Florida of orange groves, more than anyone in the long line of comics going back to the first Black minstrels, vaudeville, the chitlin circuit, and Amos ’n’ Andy ever had before.
But now, in 1982, Richard told us, after a trip to Africa, after nearly meeting his maker, after seeing the beauty of the West African people (who looked so much like people back home), that he had seen the error of his ways and that he was never ever going to use the word “nigger” again. (Curiously enough, that same year, an album of his “greatest hits” hit the stands—Supernigger. Maybe the record company had other ideas.)
I had gone to see the movie on a Saturday night with a group of folk, including a good buddy also named Richard, and we talked about the word and Pryor’s decision long into the night after the show. I had adored Richard Pryor from my time as a cub and continued to adore him, even if I disagreed with his self-censorship. At nineteen I fretted over what I saw as a largely superficial, even sentimental response to the magnitude of the African diaspora: Black folk are indeed larger than the Middle Passage, and to encounter the vastness of what slavery has wrought—from the West Indies to the Americas to the source of our legacy—is to be shocked, humbled, uplifted, chastened even. But did Pryor really just reach this insight at the age of forty-one? Should we look back upon all his riotous riffs, his cleverness, his genius with a jaundiced eye? All that wordplay? All those times he had unfurled the word “nigger” as if it were Superman’s cape? Used it as a knife to white America’s carotid artery? Or as a multicolored quilt, stained with blood and warmed with a mother’s love to swaddle a homeboy? Can the massive frigates of history so easily be turned about? Are words so fixed in their original meanings that they cannot be reappropriated, recharged, resurrected, born again?
Some would have us believe that the word is so blood-soaked, so scornful, such a thing-maker, that to breathe it is to make a thing out of yourself, to unwittingly buy into the overarching, all-powerful worldview of white supremacy.
Nigger, please.
My friend Richard said he could see both sides. He said he was going to take the matter under advisement.
I knew even then that the use of the word “nigger” was much more complex than what Mr. Pryor had reduced it to. By denying the history the word had among Black folk—the history it had with him—he lost sight of the true genius of Black people. For me, when my lover or my brother or my mother calls me “my nigger,” I know exactly what they mean, and it vibrates on levels undreamt of by people who would deny me my humanity.
Meanwhile, in the well-heeled suburbs of Scottsdale and San Diego, Shaker Heights and Scarsdale, any one of us can find a rich white boy who would take it as the highest honor on Earth for you—with great sincerity and at the top of your voice—to greet him as “Nigger.”
For some these ideas are abhorrent; for them the word is fixed, eternally, in the actions and mindset of the enemy; for them language is more powerful than the user. But for me the amazing thing is that the word can still be used as a sword. At the end of the day it really is just a word, children. Like ox and sin and fear and hate and catsup and peanut butter. We use language; language does not use us. If, however, the whirligig of talk spins the other way around, you have larger, more pressing problems. Better to worry about sticks and stones, hedge funds and mortgage rates, voter-registration reform and unemployment. Those are the things that can break your bones and hurt you.
As time marched on and the entire American populace—not just the liberals—became more politically correct (i.e., polite), the word suddenly became much more dangerous than it had been even in the ’50s or ’60s or ’70s—the huge irony being that in 1950 if you were Black and someone called you “nigger,” you were probably in certain peril, one way or the other. If, in the Internet Age, you are Black and someone calls you “nigger,” he or she is (a) deranged, (b) masochistic, (c) another Black person, or (d) a white person trying desperately to be hip.
At the center of this emblematic difference of viewpoint within the Black community, so many years after slavery has ended, with segregation largely squelched, and in a time when we have ourselves an Oprah Winfrey and a Condi Rice—at the center rests a disagreement about the meaning of Blackness. Though I, like my friend Richard, could always see both sides, the argument always seemed weaker than water to me.
The work needing to be done is much deeper than epithets and good manners. The roots of the problems lie in a mutual not-knowing, a mutual belief in Otherness, a reluctance to give voice to deeper mistrusts. In order to bridge that gap, bit by bit, brick by brick, we must dismantle the House of Race. It is not a word; it is a way of thinking. It is not a white thing, or a Black thing; it is an American thing.
Ethnicity, yes; race, forget about it. This shift will continue to be a tricky business, but our changing demographics make the shift not only inevitable but centrally important. It is not difficult to understand that many Americans are sentimental about race, perhaps none more so than Brother Rabbit. The great fear is that by deemphasizing race, not only will identity be lost, but some collective power; and that ancestors will be dishonored or betrayed. Regardless of those misgivings, that great work is already afoot.
Who was it who said that there is nothing more irresistible than an idea whose time has come?
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I remember with great fondness the much-beloved and highly sentimental 1971 made-for-television movie Brian’s Song, with its soaring music (“The Hands of Time”) that can still be heard via Muzak in elevators around the world. The film is mawkish without shame: Only under the rubric of sports do you see American alpha males allow themselves to be so tender; to blubber freely and be applauded for it. Only in sports is it okay for big, strong he-men to be sentimental. Based on Gayle Sayers’ best-selling memoir I Am Third, the movie is an account of the African American football player’s friendship with his fellow Chicago Bear, Brian Piccolo, and of Piccolo’s death from cancer at age twenty-seven. There is a memorable scene in which Sayers (Billy Dee Williams) and Piccolo (James Caan) are exercising and bonding. At one point, Piccolo, in a moment of mock fury, calls Sayers a nigger. They both collapse into paroxysms of laughter. It is an unforgettable scene, centuries of history and future collapsed into one indelible moment, a recognition of the folly, a leap in openness and vulnerability, an acknowledgment of these two men’s fixed realities (in the 1960s) and of their love for each another. It is one of those unusual, raw, true glimpses, amidst the vast detritus of mass media, of humanity and friendship and truth. Today, despite all the Lethal Weapons and Rush Hours and Die Hards and all the other buddy-buddy Black-and-white, Black-and-Asian, and whatever other mixture action pictures, depictions of such genuine and telling interactions remain rare, are hardly ever captured and laid before the masses. You won’t see such a thing on broadcast television today, and probably not on cable either.
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Mr. John W. Brown lost his eyesight just before he died. I think we refused to admit it; he admitted to some difficulty in seeing, but he managed to get around and even sat before the television, only asking now and again for us to tell him about what was going on. But once he was in the hospital, a note over his bed read Patient is blind. Many illusions began to fade with that, along with a certain degree of magical thinking.
He suffered from a rare vascular disorder. It had originally stricken him fourteen years before, and had actually killed him, clinically. But he had been revived and, in the fullness of time, he regained almost full health, save the loss of a thumb due to the vascular damage.
The loss of eyesight had been particularly galling, for Mr. Brown had been an avid reader. If my bookishness had struck most of the community as queer and a waste of time, I could always rely on him as a champion. Always each day began with the newspaper and a prolonged discussion about those idiots in Washington. I had delighted so much in his delight in the novel Jaws and sharks that in later years I would try to find more books for him featuring sharks. And books about sports figures. I remember his relish of a biography of Jackie Robinson that his daughter had given him for Christmas. The ensuing lectures about Robinson (whom he had seen from the stands), about segregation, about the dignity and symbolism and responsibility of Black athletes, could literally go on for hours.
His eyesight had been threatened once before, but in a different way.
That early spring, when the Pile* was almost worn down. By this time I knew it would soon be history. Had it been possible, I would have been out there that day alongside Mr. Brown, digging, chopping, burning. I loved the smell of the many fires he kept burning to get rid of the debris.
He was alone when the thorn from a bush caught his eye. The cut was deep. A true puncture. So deep in fact that the vitreous fluid quickly drained out. The eye collapsed. Edythe rushed him to the hospital in Kinston. Who knew that, if properly stitched, an eyeball will reinflate like a beach ball?
The eye patch made him look very like a pirate (my boyhood obsession), and he joked about the entire affair, but it was tinged with gravitas. No one wants to lose an eye.
Soon he was back to work.
___________
As simple as it seems, it’s all about learning how to see.
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* In an earlier chapter of The Fire This Time, from which this essay is taken, Kenan describes how his great-aunt’s daughter Edythe and her husband Mr. Brown built a house in Chinquapin, in back of which was a half acre covered with “tree stumps and immature trees and woodland refuse, high and tangled, dark and forbidding—but at the same time lush and wild. . . . To my pre-teen eyes the idea of the Pile, as we came to call it, was a permanence . . . [that] would clearly take years if not eons to remove.” Yet “every day after school I would join [Mr. Brown]. As his house slowly took shape, he would be out back, every day, chopping, sawing, digging, burning, burning, burning.”
13
Notes Toward an Essay on Imagining Thomas Jefferson Watching a Performance of the Musical Hamilton
At elegant gatherings and august meetings, I often scan the room and wonder aloud why I am, as people like myself are often given to ask, the Only Negro in the Room, or ONR, as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Natasha Trethewey have been known to note. Surely Black intellectuals are central to these types of inquiries, surely Black writers and artists and thinkers have something to say in the matter. And yet our involvement tends to be relegated to the margins. And our attendance tends to be poor. Our work finds its way into the discussion, ’tis true. But to quote from the landmark 1965 play by Douglas Turner Ward, A Day of Absence: “Where the negras at?”
I am not foreign to these gatherings; in fact, I usually have a front-row seat. This makes sense, as I have never run away from my ur-Southern rural roots or my African American heritage; in fact, for better or worse, I’ve run toward it, even when running away from it. I’ve gladly embraced it, even when it pricked me with thorns. I chose to think about and study these matters as if they matter.
No one articulated this better to me than Charles Rowell, the founder and editor of Callaloo, the preeminent journal of African American arts and letters. We were in Charlottesville, approaching the main and iconic building of Monticello, and we were discussing the recent hubbub surrounding the Jefferson family acknowledging their Black cousins. And Charles was talking about the very subject about which we are still concerned today: Southernness. Charles turned to me and said, “Of course we have absolutely no investment in this argument. We know the truth of the matter. We always knew the truth of the matter. We are the South.”
For people steeped in the study of the African American and the African in America, anxiety about the definition of “Southern” becomes tertiary at best because it is primary. What has been so vividly apparent about the South was nestled close to us long before Jim Crow caused so many of us to leave the South; those great many of us who have returned over the last several decades know it intimately. We knew we were going back to what Albert Murray dubbed “South to a Very Old Place.” We were returning home.
The irony of Charles Rowell educating me, hipping me to this point on the grounds of Monticello has resonated with me over the years more and more powerfully as I move away from that date in 1992. Black folk and white folk acknowledge with ease the centrality of Thomas Jefferson and his grand folly on that high hill in Virginia as being at the center of the Making of Americans, to steal from Gertrude Stein—central not only as a symbol of the industry and brilliance of the Founding Fathers but also as a material signifier of the sin and horror and mixing of blood and culture and souls. The hearth of our nation as well as its heart. So much of what makes the South “South” is embodied in that place and its history, even in its decline and resurrection, like Scarlett O’Hara and Tara. So much masking, so much denial, so much buried truth, while so much was always apparent to Black folk.
No, brothers and sisters, this anxiety over the South is not experienced by Black folk in the same way, to the same degree, because we know that Southernness is inextricably bound to Blackness. During the Great Migrations, Southernness traveled. It traveled up on the Chickenbone Special to Washington and Baltimore and, yes, Harlem, sweet, sweet Harlem. It traveled up the Mississippi to Detroit and Gary and that great hog butcher to the world, Chicago. It traveled out west from Louisiana and Texas to Los Angeles and San Francisco. I am not the first to point out that Black neighborhoods in these great metropolises are hotbeds of Southernness. Go to Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles, go to the South Side of Chicago, go and see for yourself.
In 1912, the famous Swiss psychologist Carl Jung said in an interview with the New York Times (TRIGGER WARNING: he said some stuff that many of us today would consider racist and imperialist and just plain wicked):
In America the Indians do not influence you now; they have fallen back before your power, and they are very few. They influenced your ancestors. You, to-day, are influenced by the negro race, which not so long ago had to call you master. In the North the negro’s present influence is not great. In the South, where they are not given opportunities equal to the white race, their influence is very great. They are really in control.
I notice that your Southerners speak with the negro accent; your women are coming to walk more and more like the negro. In the South I find what they call sentiment and chivalry and romance to be the covering of cruelty. Cruelty and chivalry are another pair of opposites. The Southerners treat one another very courteously, but they treat the negro as they would treat their own unconscious mind if they know what was in it. When I see a man in a savage rage with something outside himself, I know that he is, in reality, wanting to be savage toward his own unconscious self.
Thus sayeth Carl Jung in 1912.
This is usually the point where someone wants to interrupt me and say, Mr. Brother, Professor Kenan, sir, surely you are forgetting all the poor, yeomen white men and women who toiled and bled in the South, who fought in the War of Northern Aggression, who are the proud, true, often forgotten cornerstone of the South. Not the ones who owned the plantations and the land and the cotton mills and the slaves, but the humble, the salt of the earth. Have you forgotten us?
No. I ain’t forgot y’all.
I could bore you at this point with a long disquisition on Toni Morrison’s 1992 book-length essay Playing in the Dark, where she makes a strong case for the presence of what she calls “Africanism” throughout American literature, finding it where others saw (see) no Black folk. And I could make a case for the same being true throughout Southern letters. I find it ironic that Morrison’s family left Alabama, literally, in the dead of night, fleeing an unjust sharecropping situation, in fear for life and limb, and that she grew up in Lorain, Ohio, and yet her work is often cited as the epitome of Southern literature, alongside her heroes, Faulkner and Welty.
As I said, Black folk have always known these things as bedrock truths. And for us to have anxiety about a change in the power structure—something about which we’ve been anxious for over two hundred years—is to have anxiety about the infrastructure, not the mythology and romance that surrounds that infrastructure.
I know these assertions make a lot of folk uncomfortable—especially, primarily, a lot of white folk. “Uncomfortable” is the euphemism we use, because we all tend to be polite. But as I heard one UNC professor recently say in a meeting, “My students hate to talk about race. They just hate it.” People are afraid of saying the wrong thing. People are afraid of being attacked for an innocent comment, for having an opinion. They want to say: “Hey, man, this is your thing, this ain’t my thing.” They want to say: “My name is Bess, and I ain’t in this mess.” When, in truth, this mess is our mess. Just as when you inherit a great fortune, you are the beneficiary and it becomes your joy and your responsibility, when you inherit a conundrum, it is your burden and your responsibility to manage it.
In truth, Black folk do harbor one primary anxiety about this abiding self-consciousness toward Southernness, and that worry swirls about the discussion of food. Food was the only province in which the African American contribution has not been thoroughly muted, a place where white Southerners have rushed to acknowledge the African on their plate, the okra and peanut and the rice; it’s a place where a shared humanity and culture have been readily acknowledged, up to a point. Food was seen as soft, domestic, even feminine—as if that automatically made it less-than, not so very important. But now, when Whole Foods acknowledges collard greens as the “new Super Food” and so much “rediscovery” of Southern food actively erases Black faces, Black folk are going to have a problem with that.
