Busted in New York and Other Essays

by Darryl Pinckney

  World War II brought another generation of black soldiers, among them Ralph Ellison, who tired of hearing that life in Paris was good because blacks were served in its restaurants and black men could sit in public with white women. Both Wright and Baldwin reflected on the discrepancy between the way the French treated them as black Americans—writers, at that—and the manner in which the French handled Algerians. African independence movements made it impossible not to question the mask of European tolerance and enlightened culture. Wright argued that France was no utopia, but, compared to the United States, the difference in his daily life amazed him. The French may not have been free of racism, but Paris was free of Jim Crow. It irked Baldwin that Wright insisted on looking at Paris as the “city of refuge,” though he, too, savored the detachment of being away. He expressed it as a search for identity, whereas for Wright it was a social question. Wright believed that in France he was free, though he was not, and Baldwin wrote of the entrapment of living in Europe as an American, even though he was at liberty.

  Baldwin was twenty-four when he got away to Paris in 1948. He used the funds from a literary fellowship to pay for the airplane ticket and stayed broke for the next nine years. The awful hotels told him why so much Parisian life took place in cafés. By the time Baldwin reached the Deux Magots, Wright had turned forty and had arrived a year earlier under circumstances that were Jamesian in comparison to Baldwin’s—with his Oldsmobile in the ship’s hold. Wright was internationally acclaimed and had his family with him; Baldwin was unknown and navigated with longings that had no settled object. Perhaps the distance between forty and twenty-four meant more then than it does now, but Wright, in the Paris he shared with Baldwin, seemed a much older man to me at seventeen, possibly because Baldwin so effectively cast him as such. Wright’s expatriate experience was remote, historical, but Baldwin’s inspired me because it seemed possible, within reach, contemporary.

  I had yet to find out that scrounging around was the opposite of liberating. Baldwin, penniless in a Europe of postwar scarcity, followed the ghosts of Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, who had been young vagabonds in their time, jumping steamers and washing dishes and combing waterfronts. To me, the “allowed responsibility” that Baldwin talked about was the romance of deracination. Expatriatism was an earlier, culturally sanctioned version of dropping out and finding yourself. In my teenage days—the late 1960s—classmates of my sisters could make my parents blink by announcing that they were quitting college to found a Harriet Tubman Brigade in Georgia, that they were selling vitamins in order to get some money together to join a commune in India—anything to avoid the traps of what they confidently referred to as bourgeois existence, the compromised life. It wasn’t Jim Crow they were worried about.

  Baldwin’s voyage of discovery was sexual and ruthlessly self-centered, a pilgrimage that suited the ideology of youth. I did not know that youth was the most transient of social categories. Most important, Baldwin’s exile was literary, a quest for voice. I imagined a narrow, ill-lit room with an overflowing ashtray, the props of composition, and the sounds that went with concentration: muffled street life, weather, hearts pounding or records playing down the corridor, and no parent anywhere to hammer on the locked door. I was convinced that the stranger in a strange land lived in a state of grace. You could behave toward where you came from as someone just passing through. You could look at where you ended up as someone invisible. The observer, I told myself, is by temperament an outsider, an infiltrator, a traitor. Three things the writer needs, Joyce said: silence, exile, and cunning.

  Baldwin, as a civil rights spokesman, could age, and he did, in talk show after talk show. But James Baldwin in Paris remained, like Werther, a youth forever seeking his conversion experience. My misinterpretation was shameless, which I can only explain by remembering how in need of character I was when I first read Notes of a Native Son. But it meant that the expatriate heaven I wanted to look for would be impossible to find, because it was already nostalgic fantasy. Some books you never get over, like a first love. Some books that made an enormous impression on you when you were young you are afraid to read again years later, like being sorry you’d met that former love for coffee, because you couldn’t see what you once saw. But there are a few books that can still move you in the old, throbbing way.

  When I was growing up, Europe and Africa, as cultural ideals, were like Chi-Chi and An-An, the giant pandas of the London and Beijing zoos that failed to mate. Though Africa once again became Mother Africa during my youth, my interest in the Third World was political, not literary. It was an opportunity for engagement, but I preferred disengagement. Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers hating Huey Newton in Havana did not conjure up an image to rival that of Baldwin and Wright quarreling in Paris. I grew up before the vogue of retracing the stages of the Middle Passage, from the Caribbean to the slave prison in the harbor at Dakar, when Europe was safe, psychologically close, simply because you did not need a string of vaccinations to go there. Apart from Maya Angelou’s autobiography, there wasn’t much literary testimony about expatriate life in Africa that I knew of. Culturally, Africa in the 1960s did not present itself to me as especially urban or big-city. I didn’t know the Lagos novels of Cyprian Ekwensi. Alan Paton was white, and the Johannesburg of his Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) that the black minister goes to in search of his family contained too much prayer and nothing escapist about sin.

  When, at the end of his life, W.E.B. Du Bois couldn’t stand where he lived anymore, he left the United States. Du Bois renounced his citizenship and moved to Ghana. He was ninety-five years old when he died, the day before the March on Washington in 1963. It seemed that every black of a certain age during my childhood had a memory of the revered Dr. Du Bois wielding his gold-tipped cane. My Atlanta grandparents went to his public lectures. My mother grew up seeing him every day as she walked to the Oglethorpe School. My father explained that he never exchanged a word with Du Bois as the distinguished man slowly made his way to campus not because he was intimidated—my father said he was intimidated by no one—but because the young could not speak to their elders without having been spoken to first, and Du Bois had no greetings for students. In one house where he was a guest, he came down the stairs, took a look at the company gathered in his honor, turned, and headed back upstairs without a word. But when his name came up, it was like talking about someone who had fallen off the edge of the earth. I thought it was because he who had been a student in Berlin in the 1890s had chosen Africa, but Du Bois’s becoming a nonperson was really the result of his membership in the Communist Party late in his life. He was harassed by the State Department and ignored by wary black intellectuals and civil rights leaders.

  Though Du Bois was received in Accra like Herod in Rome, the final chapter of his life had the scandalous quality of the great man cheated of honor in his own country. The bitterness behind his exile was irrevocable, a scar that could not be quieted. Because of his example, I have this anxiety that old age for African-Americans is not marked by forgiveness or by a vision of triumph on the other side of the mountain, but by a wild grief that all the patience has been for nothing. Du Bois dedicated his last energies to compiling an Encyclopedia Africana. Then he yielded to the heat, listened to the roar from the Gulf of Guinea. If there was an accusation in his affirmation of the “African personality,” after the liberators had been supplanted by tyrants or been turned into dictators themselves, its force needed a suspension of disbelief, a willfulness similar to the Stalinoid obtuseness that once led a black activist to excuse the gulag by praising the sight of a schoolroom of nine-year-olds playing chess in Moscow.

  In the long history of black people being rejected by the United States and of black people rejecting the United States in turn, emigration to Africa had always been projected as a mass rather than an individual solution. Thomas Jefferson advised that free blacks ought to be removed “beyond the reach of mixture,” because they contradicted the institutionally defined relat
ionship between blacks and whites. In 1789, the Free African Union Society of Newport, Rhode Island, embraced, for reasons of wounded esteem, the call for removal as the only way to escape discrimination. Sierra Leone was founded in 1787, Liberia in 1822, but in between, in 1804, rose Haiti, which transformed the meaning of leaving the United States. Going away was no longer admitting defeat or showing acquiescence to the propaganda that the territory of the United States belonged to the white man. Departure became heroic, a verdict delivered against the unredeemed.

  The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 denied to blacks the protection of the Sixth Amendment—involving the right to trial—and the Dred Scott decision of 1857 held that blacks had not been citizens of the United States when the Constitution was written and had not become citizens since. Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, suddenly categorized as fugitive slaves, took refuge in England. Brown saw Thomas Carlyle on a public conveyance in London and, remembering his rage at Carlyle’s essay “On the Nigger Question,” sent a sketch of a grubby, disheveled man to his abolitionist newspaper back in the States. Though the abolitionist movement became thoroughly confrontational, blacks despaired that they would ever gain their rights, even in non-slaveholding states. A black physician, Martin R. Delany, declared in 1852 that emigration was absolutely necessary for political elevation. Delany tried to set up a black state in Nicaragua. A similar plan took him to the Niger River valley in 1859. As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a foreign country, the Old Testament proverb has it.

  The early dreams of getting out were conceived in terms of repatriation, but as connections to Africa dropped away, emigration schemes looked to the New World. There were so many places to go, and you didn’t have to cross oceans to get to them, though the obstacles were formidable enough. Escaped slaves established a colony in Veracruz, Mexico. The number of runaway slaves living in Canada at the outbreak of the Civil War was said to be forty thousand. As early as 1855, there were four thousand blacks in California, and after Reconstruction’s demise Oklahoma became a popular location for the founding of all-black towns.

  For most blacks, however, the Promised Land was not a distant country. The Promised Land was release from bondage. The legacy of Emancipation was that the language was biblical, that black people in the United States were for the most part integrationist, and that the coming up out of Egypt was therefore the attainment of equal rights. A sharp distinction was made between moving on, seeking the better life, and going back. Go back to where? “Abide in the ship, or you cannot be saved.” A black Quaker merchant had transported thirty-eight blacks to Sierra Leone after the War of 1812, and a Haiti Emigration Society existed in 1818, but from the very beginning the majority of free blacks resisted voluntary emigration, saying that it would mean abandoning those blacks still in slavery and that they as a people were too altered for West Africa. They also resented the implication of inferiority in colonization schemes: that they would never be at home in the United States, though their ancestors had been the “first cultivators of its wilds”; that they would never make good, though their “blood and sweat had manured its fields.” By the time the Liberian Exodus and Joint Stock Company collapsed in 1879 and the African Emigration Association went under in 1886, such schemes were mainly dismissed as crackpot.

  The call to emigrate was a manifestation of black nationalism, which was itself a high or low fever depending on conditions. The fever was raging in the 1920s, and it only needed Marcus Garvey to take advantage of it. Garvey’s very theatrical Back to Africa movement was particularly successful among working-class blacks who had come North in search of jobs and safety from lynching. The self-proclaimed President of Africa, Garvey opened negotiations with Liberia, whose government feared he would take over the country. Garvey was abused for meeting with the Ku Klux Klan, just as blacks had distrusted antebellum colonization schemes because secessionists like John C. Calhoun favored them. The feeling was that if whites—even Lincoln—wanted blacks to go so badly, perhaps blacks should stay. Then, too, Garveyism, like its predecessors, overlooked as much as any colonialist venture the fact that these lands were already inhabited. Garvey, who disclosed that God was black, eventually failed, but Garveyism restored Africa in the popular imagination as the original link in the chain of identity. The shame was gone; there was honor in where black people came from. Emigration’s message was absorbed by separatists who rediscovered Garveyism in the 1960s, by which time going back to Africa could be an inward journey. Africa ceased to be a destination and became a symbol.

  Baldwin pointed to “the fury of the color problem” as his reason for leaving the United States, as had every black exile from the United States since the eighteenth century. He said that blacks born in the South could at least move North, but if you were already living in the North, the only place left to go was out of the country. I remember my father saying that if he had stayed in Georgia after he got out of university, he would have been killed. Though I had no way of knowing what it was like to live with this sense of imminent danger, of being hemmed in on every corner, I did know what Baldwin meant by the long exile blacks endured in their own country. The fury had not abated.

  * * *

  The historic complex of the African-American was a postulation of simultaneous doubleness, as defined by Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. We repeat and repeat what he said: the dual consciousness of the black person was that of “two warring ideals in one dark body,” two thoughts, two souls, “two unreconciled strivings.” Six decades after The Souls of Black Folk, the duality of African-American consciousness was no longer spoken of as an inner struggle. It became a matter of divided loyalty. Given the political climate of the time, the atmosphere of conspiracy that stretched from the Nixon White House to the Black Panther headquarters in Oakland, love of country and love of tribe represented extremes. Duality of soul was unacceptable, as if only scorched ground lay between the two forts of national and racial identity. The moment refused to allow the holding of two passports. Whose side are you on? Angela Davis was to describe her decision to give up her studies in Frankfurt in 1967 in much the same way that Baldwin reinvented himself as a commuter. By the time Dr. King and Senator Kennedy had been assassinated, the contempt and pity that so galled Du Bois belonged to the black world to aim at the white world. Black Power encouraged African-Americans to see themselves primarily as blacks, as part of a vast diaspora.

  I hadn’t been brought up to think of the African-American as oscillating between two poles, as if being both black and American were a contradiction. I always knew that my heritage was my homeland—my family, other relatives, their friends, people like them, people instantly recognizable to one another, like aliens in science-fiction films. My country was a phantom to the uninitiated. It was an archipelago superimposed on a map of the continental United States, with the heaviest cluster of islands falling in the South, the Old Country.

  In my youth, everyday black life for the black male teenager was a series of tests to gauge how black you were. Back then, as now, what constituted authentic blackness was determined by the plight of the majority, which meant the poorest. If you did not live on The Avenue, then you were at a remove from the Black Experience. If you did not walk the walk and talk the talk, then you were vulnerable to a kind of bullying. Not being down with it was perceived as weakness. It was feeble sport, because the black middle class was so available as a target—as was the white middle class—the phrase being evocative of the repressed and the repressive.

  Being of the black middle class could make you defensive. You were accused of trying to act white, of not knowing who you were. You were warned that one day soon it would be proven to you that you were black. Whites would reject you, and because of the monotonous predictability of oppression, the inevitability of betrayal, you were really no different from the toughs you tried not to heed on the movable basketball courts of apprenticeship macho. You had a lot to prove. After all, you could look for
ward to university and to exemption from the draft. Only poor blacks and poor whites were getting sent to Vietnam as privates. Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, was excoriated in 1965 when he suggested that the War on Poverty could be won if thirty-five thousand black men joined the army.

  In the late 1960s, the black bourgeoisie was synonymous with Uncle Tom. The black bourgeoisie was depicted as light-skinned, clubbish, collaborationist, materialistic; and, yes, there was too much of that. But the image of a black middle class created by federal anti-poverty programs and corrupted by patronage has obscured the historical truth of a sector of the black population that defined itself more by political and social objectives than income. Not all the physicians, ministers, or businessmen of my grandparents’ day were preoccupied solely with driving blatant Packards. The old black middle class knew more than it wanted to about the front line. There was no refuge in success. A cousin of my mother’s, a student at Atlanta University, was lynched in 1931. The old black middle class, walking to Jerusalem, never doubted that it was truly black and the true America.

  There was, consequently, a vengeful pleasure in confounding whites, in exasperating those who were eager to grant me a license of approval, probationary membership as one of them, or nearly like them—middle-class, decipherable, reliable. I had no wish to be accepted. Acceptance meant conformity, and falling-in was for cheerleaders, jocks, the living dead. Snobbery went into the disdain: those bumper stickers proclaiming AMERICA: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT were vulgar, like too many Christmas lights. The flag was at most a consolation to families at the funerals of sons who died in Vietnam.