Certain people will do anything to preserve the Dream. They want to believe that the past has little effect on the present. As Coates puts it:
“We would prefer to say such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any,” writes Solzhenitsyn. “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.” This is the foundation of the Dream—its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works.… The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one’s eyes and forgetting the work of one’s hands.
Coates is glad that his son is black. “The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.” The experience of being black gives a deeper understanding of life than that afforded to those stuck in the Dream. “They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.” For Coates, black history is “our own Dream.”
In The Fire Next Time (1963), Coates’s literary model for Between the World and Me, Baldwin addresses his nephew and tells him early on that “you can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.” Baldwin’s polemic is unforgiving of America. He then goes on to describe the frustration of black people through a visit to the Chicago headquarters of the separatist Nation of Islam. In The Fire This Time (2007), a memoir of being black and gay in the South, Randall Kenan addresses his nephew, telling him that there is much discussion about what it means to be black and that, as bad as things still are, a new class of “black folk” has emerged, the “bourgeois bohemian,” “a black intelligentsia given new and larger wings by meritocracy.” Coates, however, is confessing to his son that he, his father, cannot ultimately protect him.
He is aware of the anger in him and recalls that when his son was five they were leaving a movie theater on the Upper West Side and he nearly went off on a white woman who shoved his son because he wasn’t moving fast enough. He got into a shouting match with the white parents around him and then agonized over his uncool behavior. “I have never believed it would be okay.” The future was in our hands, Baldwin warned.
Coates wants his son’s life to be different from his, for him to escape the fear. He is pained by his son’s disappointment when the announcement comes that no charges would be lodged against Michael Brown’s killer in Ferguson. Coates urges his son to struggle, but not for the American Dreamers, their whiteness being “the deathbed of us all.” Coates remembers how “out of sync” he felt with the city on September 11, 2001. Race may be a construct, but his resentment at its damage is deep. He also says that he has never felt comfortable with the rituals of grieving in the black community. His parents weren’t just nonreligious, they were anti-Christian.
Some critics of Between the World and Me have noted that Coates offers no hope, or doesn’t believe that black people can shape their future. “It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love,” Baldwin said. Maybe Coates’s lack of belief in “agency,” why he sees us at the mercy of historical forces, is explained by the case of a Howard classmate, Prince Jones, a born-again Christian and the son of a physician, who in 2000 was killed by a police officer who had stopped his jeep in Fairfax County, Virginia. The policeman was the only witness to what happened, which was never fully explained. Fairfax authorities decided not to prosecute the officer, but the officer was from Prince George’s County, Maryland. The population in that county is overwhelmingly black. To move to this black suburb represented a step up for blacks in Baltimore.
In the militant writing of the 1960s, on sale in his father’s bookstore and what Coates read in the library he loved at Howard, the aim was to get black and to stay black, to be on your guard against the corruption of assimilation. Rejection of the American Dream—middle-class life—was implicit. As a cultural inheritance, authentic blackness became a form of ownership and intellectual capital for Coates’s hip-hop generation. You could get paid and still keep it real. Malcolm X was their hero. They didn’t believe in nonviolence. Telling it like it is, Malcolm X style, was the way to stay sane. Social hope was for clowns. You must not fall for it. Protect yourself. This is more than skepticism. To be resigned means you are not in danger of being anyone’s fool.
Coates writes in an intellectual landscape without the communism or Pan-Africanism that once figured in debate as alternatives to what white America seemed to offer. Hip-hop nationalism—of Coates’s time, say, KRS-One, Ice Cube, or the Wu-Tang Clan—has none of the provincialism of 1960s black nationalism. Coates says that he understands both Frederick Douglass, who advised blacks to remain in the United States, and Martin Delany, who led a group of blacks to Liberia. What it means to be black still changes from place to place. “For a young man like me, the invention of the Internet was the invention of space travel.” Coates’s wife fell in love with Paris and the French language, and then so did he, he says, and without thinking of Wright or Baldwin. Or Sartre or Camus, he adds. For Coates, writing is his alternative country.
Coates is in a very recognizable tradition, but that tradition is not static. Wright warned the white men of the West not to be too proud of their easy conquest of Africa and Asia. Baldwin invoked retribution of biblical magnitude if America did not end its racial nightmare. For Coates, it’s too late, given the larger picture. He speculates that now that the American Dreamers are plundering “not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself,” “something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas.”
He takes away America’s uniqueness. Human history is full of people who oppressed other people. To be white now has no meaning divorced from “the machinery of criminal power.” Is it a problem that Coates comes across as entirely reasonable in his refusal in this book to expect anything anymore, socially or politically? This is a rhetorical strategy of the tradition, but to address an audience beyond black people is to be still attempting to communicate and enlighten. No author of a book on this subject can be filled with as much hopelessness as the black writer who no longer sees the point in anyone offering a polemic against racist America.
Booker T. Washington had no interest in finding out who his white father was. Du Bois had ancestry in place of his father, who left when Du Bois was two years old. Du Bois lived from the year the freedmen were enfranchised to the day before the March on Washington, and he died a Communist in African exile. Hughes hated his father, an engineer who lived in Mexico in order to get away from Jim Crow. Wright’s sharecropper father abandoned the family. Ellison was two years old when his father died. Baldwin pitied the preacher who was really his stepfather. Baraka’s father was a postal supervisor, middle-class and in New Jersey.
Baraka gave a eulogy for Baldwin after his death, in part because he had become unpopular with whites late in his career. Baldwin turned out to have had Wright’s career, that of the engaged black writer. But he admired Ellison, who chose his art over being a spokesman and never finished his second novel. Baldwin’s biographer, James Campbell, remembered that after he ran into Ellison at the Newport Jazz Festival, Baldwin said, “Ralph Ellison is so angry, he can’t live.”
2015
THE GREAT PUZZLE
The house Negro, according to Malcolm X, looked out for his master’s interest and put the field Negro back in his place on the plantation when he got out of line. The house Negro lived better than the field Negro, Malcolm X explained. He ate the same food as the master, dressed and spoke just as well. The house Negro loved the master more than the master loved himself, while the field Negro prayed for a strong wind to come along should the master’s house catch fire. Malcolm X said that he was a field Negro, and for h
im the black establishment, the black upper class, became synonymous with the house Negro. “You’re nothing but an ex-slave. You don’t like to be told that. But what else are you? You are ex-slaves. You didn’t come here on the Mayflower. You came here on a slave ship.”
The black elite provoked some scorn in the civil rights era of revolution in mass black consciousness. In The Negro Family in the United States (1939), E. Franklin Frazier had described how migration and the urbanization of black America changed the criteria by which a black upper class defined itself. Bloodline gave way to position. In his grand remonstrance, Black Bourgeoisie (1957), Frazier castigated the black upper class for having deteriorated into a sad imitation of conspicuously consuming white America. Others criticized black institutions for being conformist. For figures like Malcolm X, the history of black resistance exposed the futility of conventional avenues of struggle, as if illustrating Foucault’s point about the moral training of populations and the reform of manners as a means of reducing threat to property. Whether it was seen as politically impotent or socially up its own ass, the black elite was an irrelevance at a time when the forces of liberation were out to reshape the world and when the vernacular was being elevated as the true source of black culture.
The idea of an Old Settler’s temperament in a black person seemed absurd. In his 1965 autobiography, Long Old Road, the distinguished sociologist Horace R. Cayton wrote about leaving Seattle in response to increased racism and running away to sea, where he befriended a veteran black sailor named Longreen who was unfamiliar with his past: “Of course I didn’t mention to Longreen anything about my grandfather being a senator or that we had once had a horse and carriage and a Japanese servant. He wouldn’t have believed me if I had, and I’d learned by then that with the general run of Negroes it was better not to refer to such an elegant background.”
Just as white people in New York descended from Dutch colonists thought of themselves as Old Settlers, so, too, did black people already living in northern cities before the mass migration of mostly black agricultural workers from the South during World War I, especially upper-class blacks who were somewhat tolerated because they were few. Cayton’s father’s newspaper only became a black publication after the war, when so many blacks moved to Seattle that he lost his white advertisers. He had to remind his son that although one of Cayton’s grandfathers had been the first black U.S. senator, the other had been a slave, as had he, his father.
In Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), the landmark work on Chicago that Cayton wrote with St. Clair Drake, the black upper class was, significantly, not a leisure class but a largely professional one that supplied goods and services to the Negro community. In the Cold War days immediately after World War II, race leadership still came from the upper class. Its members fought segregation in every aspect and resented being told that they were trying to be white or to mix socially with whites. Because of segregation, blacks of all classes lived in close proximity. It was not poverty that upper-class blacks minded, Drake and Cayton said, so much as lack of decorum. Most black people in Chicago at the time of their study were employed as laborers.
Cayton was also clear that writing his autobiography was an attempt at self-reclamation. In the late 1930s and into the 1940s he had been a part of a vigorous scene of black intellectuals in Chicago, described in Lawrence P. Jackson’s The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 (2011). Yet after World War II, its promises of freedom unanswered, Cayton became increasingly bitter in his lectures, and as a community-center director he worried that he was little more than a stooge for the white man. One day he woke up in his office with a pistol in his hand. His autobiography ends not long after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, with him fighting depression and alcoholism, trying to start over, heading back out west. Horace Cayton would die in 1970 in Paris, where he was doing research for a biography of his friend Richard Wright. The black autobiographical tradition does not have many losers.
Margo Jefferson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1995, has nothing to prove and everything to say in Negroland (2015), her brave, elegantly written memoir of growing up black and different. Born into the self-contained world of upper-class black Chicago that Drake and Cayton studied, Jefferson and her older sister spent their formative years, the 1950s and 1960s, in the bourgeois enclave of Hyde Park, daughters of the head of pediatrics at Provident Hospital, the oldest black hospital in the country, and a glamorous mother whose photograph could appear in the black press. Jefferson attended the famously progressive University of Chicago Laboratory School and High School. “Negroland is my name for a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty,” she says.
Class in black America has “a fraught history with many roots,” its distinctions going back to whether blacks were free or slave, Northerner or Southerner, property owner or unskilled worker, literate or not, light-skinned or not. Jefferson herself is descended in part from the Negro elite that was defined early on by how much it had to do with white people, its relation to white people, its nearness to them, by occupation, such as caterer or barber, or blood, even a former slave master’s. But after characterizing them this way, she writes, “I’ve fallen into a mocking tone that feels prematurely disloyal. There were antebellum founders of Negroland who triumphed through resolve and principled intelligence.” The severity of the black condition explains why blacks who could do so accepted the protection that identification with powerful whites offered. But she also recognizes that “Negro exceptionalism had its ugly side: pioneers who advanced through resolve, intelligence, and exploiting their own.” For example, we know now that one of the first legal slaveholders in seventeenth-century Virginia was an African man.
Jefferson unearths works such as Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society, published in 1841 in Philadelphia by Joseph Willson, a dentist and printer, the son of a Georgia slaveholder and an enslaved woman whom he freed before she bore his five children. In 1858, Cyprian Clamorgan, a barber descended from a prominent white St. Louis family, published The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. Jefferson notes the difference in style between Willson’s pride in his family’s quiet success and Clamorgan’s bragging about his white ancestors and large income. She takes her early examples of the black elite seriously and gives them their due, understanding their flaws and limitations, like family.
Jefferson has a deep sympathy for intellectual black women in the nineteenth century—the poet and diarist Charlotte Forten; the teacher and essayist Anna Julia Cooper, who received her doctorate from the Sorbonne when she was sixty-five years old; Ida B. Wells, the anti-lynching crusading journalist; and Charlotte Hawkins Brown, the founder of a finishing school in North Carolina for black girls. Jefferson writes that W.E.B. Du Bois, who was born in 1868 and published his first book, The Philadelphia Negro, in 1899, “shares Cooper’s radical romanticism” as well as “Wells’s outrage,” but that “he is intent on cutting a much wider swath, sometimes at their expense.” On recordings, his voice resembles FDR’s.
Perhaps because of the influence of Northern abolitionists or the New England schoolteachers who went south to teach the freedmen during Reconstruction, the image of the stern, stringent Bostonian replaced the doomed, noble Southern aristocrat as the class ideal for black people largely trained at anxious, black-church colleges. But for black America social status came to depend mostly on what an individual had achieved, precisely because individual achievement was not separate from the advancement of the black race as a whole. What Du Bois described in his 1903 essay “The Talented Tenth” was not an abstraction. In his vision, the few would lead the many. It was not where you were from that mattered but rather where you were headed.
What was forgotten in the protests of the 1960s—a period when black people began to enter the middle classes in meaningful numbers—was that for more than a century
the sheer existence of a black upper class had represented a challenge to the racial status quo. The people in Jefferson’s world benefited from the civil rights movement as much as any black people did. But the social mobility of black people was not, for her, a testament to the openness of American society. Jefferson learned early that her family was where it was in spite of American society. On one road trip in 1956, her family traveled happily to Quebec and then New York, but a hotel in Atlantic City wouldn’t put them in the suite they’d reserved. They left the next day: “Such treatment encouraged privileged Negroes to see our privilege as more than justified: It was hard-won and politically righteous, a boon to the race, a source of compensatory pride, an example of what might be achieved.”
They were not a normal family, not like the ones Jefferson saw on television or at the movies. Her parents had to do careful research before holidays in order to make sure things would be okay for them when they got to where they were going, and even then something could still happen. In the 1950s,
liberal whites who saw that we too had manners, money, and education lamented our caste disadvantage. Less liberal or non-liberal whites preferred not to see us in the private schools and public spaces of their choice. They had ready a bevy of slights: from skeptics the surprised glance and spare greeting; from waverers the pleasantry, eyes averted; from disdainers the direct cut. Caucasians with materially less than us were given license by Caucasians with more than them to subvert and attack our privilege.
Her mother told her a lot of white people did not like to address a Negro as “Doctor.” It would seem little compared to, say, the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 for the crime of supposedly having whistled at a white woman, but mob violence and casual disrespect had roots in the same license to attack black people. Trouble knows your name, James Baldwin said.
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 21