* * *
In his insistence on such awkward questions, Pinckney proves himself, as one essay title confesses, “Under the Spell of James Baldwin.” For Baldwin never tired of being awkward. Pinckney’s Baldwin, though, is not quite the Baldwin currently experiencing a surge of popularity: the late Baldwin, the TV-talking-head Baldwin, the celebrity Baldwin selectively quoted in the film I Am Not Your Negro. Indeed, what Pinckney’s several essays on Baldwin reveal is that Baldwin can only really be selectively quoted—he espoused so many different, often contradictory, ideas over the years, that whichever Baldwin we want is generally the one we tend to get. Pinckney’s Baldwin not only did not despair of the possibility of racial coexistence but considered it existentially vital (“We, the black and the white, deeply need each other if we are really to become a nation—if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women. To create a nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task: there is certainly no need now to create two, one black, and one white.”) Pinckney’s Baldwin not only implied that white people can be fellow travelers in the struggle but that it was possible for his own favorite teacher, a white woman, to be structurally yet not actually black:
She gave me books to read and talked to me about the books, and about the world: about Spain, for example, and Ethiopia, and Italy, and the German Third Reich; and took me to see plays and films to which no one else would have dreamed of taking a ten-year-old boy.… It is certainly partly because of her … that I never really managed to hate white people—though, God knows, I have often wished to murder more than one or two.…
From Miss Miller, therefore, I began to suspect that white people did not act as they did because they were white, but for some other reason, and I began to try to locate and understand the reason. She, too, anyway, was treated like a nigger, especially by the cops, and she had no love for landlords.
And of course Baldwin is also the black writer who was so good at appropriation (or assimilation? or fiction?) that his most famous novel is narrated in the first person by a gay white man.… In place of the consistent black saint we have recently been offered, then, Pinckney gives us back the fabulously inconsistent man and writer, shot through with both self-hatred and self-love, filled with contradictions and marvels and rhetorical fireworks and hot air and pure genius. The Baldwin who, like Pinckney himself, escaped the American struggle for a while—or got a new perspective on it—by leaving for Europe.
* * *
Many go to Paris; Pinckney went to Germany and England. As for Baldwin, Wright, and Ellison before him, leaving the United States brought Pinckney both exhilaration and anxiety. (“You could still find a sort of prejudice among black people against European expatriatism, as if it were only a rung below passing for white”—again, merely an individual solution to what was a problem for the black masses.) But his spell abroad in no way lessened his fascination with the diaspora. Instead, in his European essays, he tracks black lives on unexpected journeys and down strange back alleys. It is a delight to follow him. How would I ever have heard of a book like A Black Woman’s Odyssey Through Russia and Jamaica: The Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince if not for Darryl’s digging it up? I never knew that the Communist Party worked to support the Scottsboro Boys, nor that the “cause of freedom for black people mattered to the leading writers of the Romantic movement—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron, Shelley,” nor even that “Greenwich Village was a black neighborhood when Dickens visited in 1832.” In Pinckney’s beloved Berlin, while walking through the German Historical Museum, he finds that “the chapter on German colonialism occupied a single glass case under some stairs,” where the fact that the German army massacred thousands of the Herero and Nama people in the early twentieth century is acknowledged only in a brief piece of text on the wall. In London, he wonders at British racial myopia (“Britain seemed to tell itself that black people only got to its shores in 1948, with the HMT Empire Windrush.… It was as though British people had never asked themselves what happened to the Africans who lived in London or Bristol in the eighteenth century”) but also discovers, in the busy migrant streets, a useful corrective to lazy American ideas of Pan-Africanism: “Nigerians were not Ghanaians, Kenyans were not South Africans, just as someone from Jamaica was not someone from Trinidad.”2
Returning to the States means reentering the world of his parents and taking up once more his duties as they saw them, though with a new awareness of his own complicated role:
Achievement was self-sacrifice. You must not forget where you came from. You stood on the shoulders of the past. You were one of many. This was serious. You were one of the fortunate, and therefore you had a historic destiny to help other black people. My black life was straight; in my white life I could be queer.… The connection in my mind between expatriatism and sexual freedom was very strong. It had a lot of fantasy and self-justification in it.…
To talk about things black at home … was a way of not talking about myself while seeming to. I used my being black as a way to hide from my black family.
Few are willing to acknowledge that sometimes the things we declaim most strongly usefully disguise the things we find hardest to admit, even to ourselves. “What’s new in racism” happens also to be the first subject of conversation each time I am reunited with my own family, and reading the above made me wonder: How much intimate and personal information is sidelined and obscured as we discuss what the president said about Africa or how the Italians are treating their migrants? “The very serious function of racism is distraction,” Toni Morrison once famously said. Can it even distract us from the “I” that we are?
* * *
Leaving home has its advantages but also its costs. Considering the case of the Jamaican writer and poet Claude McKay, Pinckney writes: “His example haunts me. He paid for having been away so long. One day he woke up and discovered that he was out of it and unwanted.” Darryl, too, was away a long time, while Cornel and Skip each established their own fiefdoms, and while Toni accepted her Nobel, and now he finds himself back in Harlem right in the middle of what feels to many—to me!—like a second Renaissance. For Pinckney, it must feel something like the fifth or sixth: “The culture of the black diaspora has arrived. Again.” And with it comes a dizzying array of arguments, poses, stances, and claims, some of them surely bewildering to a man who has already lived through so many twists and turns in black history. “I can’t keep up,” he tells us, “and often I can’t sign on.” No matter. “Hotep” may not be in his vocabulary, but with his portrait of Farrakhan he offers an indelible example of one. Besides, we have enough people keeping up with the latest debates and signing on with the hottest hashtags. Those interested in the culture of the black diaspora come to Pinckney’s work for other reasons. To know our multifaceted history. To figure out what progress we’ve made and how far there is to go, though, Lord knows, consensus on this matter is unlikely. I notice that even the lyrics of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing”—the so-called “black national anthem”—are open to interpretation:
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might,
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
How far is “thus far”? Have we ever been in the light? And come to think of it, are the “light” and the “white gleam” in those famous lyrics actual liberations or symbols of a colonized consciousness? Over such disputed territory does black intellectual life rove. No one knows how far we are down the path—we haven’t even agreed on the destination. (Kathleen Collins: “I believe in liberation, but I don’t believe it is at all the thing we think it is.”) But tha
t’s okay. We’re lifting every voice and singing, often quite different tunes. And how lucky we are to have Darryl Pinckney, who, without rancor, without insult, has, all these years, been taking down our various songs, examining them with love and care, and bringing them back from the past, like a Sankofa bird, for our present examination. These days Sankofas like Darryl are rare. Treasure him!
* * *
“Now, in 2018, blackness is as lethal to black people as it ever was.” So ran a line in The New York Times, and I passed over it without question. But reading these essays reminds me that though blackness can indeed still be lethal, it is not lethal in the same way nor to the same extent that it was in 1900, when black women did not have the right to vote and lynching was epidemic, nor in 1820, when to be black in America—and many other places—was to be in human bondage. Black people have every right to their pessimism (“Given the little that black people have gotten for it,” Sekou tells Pinckney, “voting fits the popular definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and each time expecting a different result.”) Yet to entirely elide the difference between the present and the past is to traduce the ancestors and obscure precisely the history of black activism found in families like Pinckney’s, in families like Coates’s, in the NAACP and the Black Panthers and Black Lives Matter, and all the other organizations and individuals that have done so much to ensure that the lives we are able to live today, however imperfect, are precisely not the same as they ever were.
As a young man, Darryl once asked his father: If racism was “so forever,” then what was the point of struggle? “To struggle was what we were put on earth for, he answered.” Respect for the history of that struggle is not erasure of the difficult present, and recognition of progress within it need not be interpreted as either capitulation or weakness. As Baldwin himself put it: “To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.” There’s more than one way to be militant.
I
SLOUCHING TOWARD WASHINGTON
1
People, black and white, say that the throngs of upstanding black men at the Million Man March showed a picture of the Black Man different from what the nation is accustomed to. Because this has always been my primary image of the Black Man—the men in my family, my father, his friends, my friends, total strangers at traffic lights, and sometimes even myself—what struck me was not the vast crowd’s proud demeanor or the insult that the crowd’s peacefulness was a pleasant surprise to most whites and to some blacks, but that the black men deserved a message more worthy of their journey than the numerology and self-election of Louis Farrakhan.
It was not a civil rights march, or even a march, though one Nation of Islam spokesman said on television that it was a march in Washington rather than a march on Washington. As more than one of the day’s speechmakers insisted, they had come neither to demand nor to ask anything of government and whites. They had come for themselves and to ask something of themselves. It was billed as a day of atonement and reconciliation. It was a mass rally, a religious convocation, a camp revival meeting on a grand scale, with some competition among the speechmakers to see who could blow the emotional lid off the patient multitudes. Perhaps those black men and the women mingling among them—1.5 million, 2 million, 400,000, 870,000?—came to experience just what it felt like to be in command of that place where history had been made a few times before. A lot of those present on October 16, 1995, had not been born in 1963.
“Thank God it’s not a million white men marching on Washington,” a white Englishman had said to me. The mean country South of the song “I’m bound for Black Mountain, me and my razor and my gun” was all that had been radiating from Capitol Hill for months. On the shuttle on Sunday, the day before the March, a black youth dressed in immaculate baggy white, including a white knit cap, did not address a word to me across the empty seat between us, nor I to him, as if in the commuter privacy of laptops and phone calls made from the air we had succumbed, as usual, to the inhibition of being outnumbered. Then, too, I worried that he would think it presumptuous of me to assume that just because he was young, chic, and black he was on his way to the March.
Washington, D.C., is a predominantly black city, and a large percentage of its population lives below the poverty line. After the emancipated slaves came to town, Congress periodically addressed poverty’s look. Jacob Riis was brought in at the turn of the century, legislators were taken on tours of alleys, told that those were the same flies that landed on their sandwiches back at the club, and during World War I the first of a few redevelopment schemes was passed. In the 1950s the worst area near the Capitol was razed, its residents relocated. Blocks have been boarded up at other times, because of the riots in the 1960s, because of “gentrification.” Black doormen perhaps had been coming back downtown without their uniforms even before Marion Barry’s first and second acts, but a part of the excitement surrounding the Million Man March was that a precinct of official marble was about to be taken over.
That Sunday afternoon, along the broad street of trees whose leaves had not yet turned, a vanguard of black entrepreneurs had set up tables of commemorative T-shirts, caps, buttons, and sweatshirts boasting slogans and rhymes. Go-go music thumped from the rear of a parked truck. On the Mall itself, that expanse of green between the Capitol and the Washington Monument, people ambled and reconnoitered, many of them middle-aged black men. Perhaps for them the Mall had been the site of earlier pilgrimages. The black men, the father-and-son-like pairs, the lawn, and the red of the Smithsonian Castle in the distance took me back to 1967, to the centenary celebrations of Morehouse College in Atlanta, when my father tried to show me around and to show off his uncomprehending offspring to President Mays. I dimly recall their chuckling over the night Martin Luther King Jr.’s classmates short-sheeted his bed. Before the Million Man March was over, I would feel very sad for King. Farrakhan had no qualms about extracting blessings from black leaders made cooperative by being dead.
Everything was ready—the long banks of portable toilets, the giant television screens, the attitudes. Everyone seemed in a prescriptive frame of mind, willing to go on record about what black men and therefore black people needed to do. “It’s time that we as black men get together. We need this unification to start being in front,” one black vendor said. We needed to throw off that European indoctrination, I heard. We needed to trust each other, I was told. We needed to start someplace. We needed to unite like the Koreans, the first groups of whom, someone informed me, were brought over like the Cubans by the CIA and set up in business. They, whites, needed to stop stereotyping, a father of two concluded.
“We need to teach our young men,” two middle-aged black women sitting on a park bench agreed. One, who planned to accept the men-only vibe by staying home with her television, said she didn’t want to see a blade of grass when the men came. When I mentioned the objections of some black women to the premise of the March, they said, “Angela Davis needs to decide.” Other black leaders also needed to decide. “We have all these ministers. Can’t be a minister and a politician. Preaching over and over. It’s very redundant.” It was obvious what was happening to black people, and it was obvious who was doing it to them. “Look at what they had to do to try to bring O.J. back down.”
I saw a group of young black men photographing and filming one another. Some of them wore the bow ties and dark suits of the Nation of Islam. New recruits, from Portland, Oregon, they gave their names as Gary X, William X.… The X marks the spot where the slave master’s name has been crossed out. We lacked self-knowledge, one of the recruits decided. We lacked self-love. “You cannot love what you do not know.” I thought of the remote men in bow ties and dark suits who had been on the streets of my childhood, before suburbs, when most blacks—in the North, at least—grew up in neighborhoods that Black Muslims either visited or lived in themselves.
I see them, in memory, passing the barber’s window. Someti
mes they stepped inside, and if the shop owner was in the right mood, he’d let them try to sell the newspaper Muhammad Speaks, a source of new Creation myths and science fiction for the Jim Crow audience. The paper’s cartoon illustrations caused some heads in the barbershop to shake in a perplexed way. The Black Muslims rang doorbells but were less persistent than Jehovah’s Witnesses. They were regarded as members of a cult, which, in the days before Charles Manson, meant merely that some troubled souls had found a refuge, a place where they could deliver themselves up for safekeeping. However, Black Muslims were also different from the other groups of the saved, like the women who renounced lipstick and served fried chicken in Father Divine’s faded restaurants, because the face of the Black Muslim was that of a black man armed with a grudge.
The cult was known to attract ex-convicts. The men seemed contained and unafraid, as if all that hustler and jailbird knowledge had been packed down tight. They were clean and quiet, unlike the thugs hanging out on the corner, people the Black Muslims may have been like before they joined up and stopped drinking. They were left alone because black people used to have a great deal of tolerance for how people got by and also because Black Muslims were considered a little off, being reformed, single-minded, and secretive.
If anything made the barbershop customers wary of Black Muslims as possibly unbalanced behind their display of superior stability, it was their separatism. Black Muslims were scornful of the civil rights movement and especially of civil rights leaders. At a time when black people were braving dogs and rednecks to integrate schools and to get to the polls, the rejection of white institutions, the call for a separate nation, seemed unhelpful to the struggle, or helpful only to Elijah Muhammad and the John Birch Society. The cult was said to own farms in Alabama. How the Nation of Islam was financed was murky, but the barbershop’s regulars understood that Black Muslims thought of Negroes as the dupes of white society, and they, in turn, provoked by the thought that another black man considered them Uncle Toms, called Black Muslims the tools of segregationists.
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 2