Freedom he had worshipped as an aloof deity …
But someone was coming in the moonlight
Treading stealthily in the deep silence.
* * *
In 1990, I didn’t feel like an expatriate. I wasn’t an immigrant either. I was a boyfriend. The someone I’d fallen for had a garden in the English countryside above Oxford. I know what it is to live in paradise.
My history began long before my life, and maybe that was why I tended to keep score when I read English literature. Where is my copy of Eva Beatrice Dykes’s The Negro in English Romantic Thought (1942)? Locke, Burke, and Hume gave themselves to the proslavery side. The fortune that the very Gothic queer William Beckford spent on art and architecture came from slave labor in Jamaica. William Cobbett may have reflected majority opinion when he deplored blacks going into the king’s army and the number of black women marrying white men, but enough white English people and white Americans considered the slave trade an offense to God. Addison and Defoe and Edward Gibbon spoke up against slavery; Sterne tried to express the nobility of Africans in his work. He was encouraged to write against the slave trade by his friend Ignatius Sancho. Enslaved at birth, Sancho was educated in an aristocratic household, where he was a butler. Eventually he set himself up as a shopkeeper and earned a reputation as a musician and man of letters. Samuel Johnson did not think it enough to advise slave owners to be kind. Chatterton, Cowper, and Erasmus Darwin wrote antislavery verse. Blake and Crabbe showed sympathy for the black man in their poetry.
The cause of freedom for black people mattered to the leading writers of the Romantic movement—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron, Shelley, Hazlitt, Landor, De Quincey, Lamb, and Leigh Hunt, a descendant of West Indian planters. (Keats, given to other musings, is notably absent.) But there is “no freedom even for masters,” Byron says in “Detached Thoughts,” adding that he wished he owned Africa so that he could do in a sweep what Wilberforce proposed to do over time. The Lord Chief Justice’s ruling in the Mansfield case in 1772 held that no man in England could be held in bondage. My father said simply that if they got a black person back to the Caribbean, then that person reverted to being a slave.
I understood why my father thought racism deep in the English psyche: the crimes went back so far. Five black people were brought to England in 1555, but Mary Tudor, persecutor of Protestants, refused to permit English participation in the Guinea trade. The English slave trade began after her death, when in 1562 three hundred Africans were kidnapped from the African coast by an English captain and taken to the Caribbean. The trade expanded greatly after the Restoration in 1660. Pepys, who had been an enthusiasm of mine in my high school years, even though I didn’t know that the edition of his Diary that I read was heavily bowdlerized, turned out to have been a shareholder in a slave trading company. When I found myself living in England, I could not look at the wonderful Georgian architecture of England without thinking of the sugar plantations that provided the wealth. Some people claimed that Jane Austen doesn’t make it explicit in Mansfield Park (1814) that the family fortune is based on slavery. But Edward Said was right to point out in Culture and Imperialism (1993) that tedious Fanny brings up the sugar trade and the fashionable people visiting from London don’t react. They say nothing; they wait for the subject to change.
The connection was not hidden. Encaenia, I soon learned, is the Oxford ceremony at which honorary degrees are given and the recipients process in academic dress to the Sheldonian Theatre. I was invited to attend. The distinguished classicist Jasper Griffin gave his address in Latin as Public Orator of the university, a feat to behold, while the forty-first University Professor of Poetry delivered, in English, the Crewe Oration in praise of the university’s benefactors for that year. Lunch afterward was held at All Souls College, in the magnificent Codrington Library, begun in the early eighteenth century in the Gothic revival style by Nicholas Hawksmoor. In my memory, the long tables stretched almost to the ends of the two-hundred-foot library, with bookshelves rising on either side in the strange light. Professor Griffin directed my gaze to the coffered ceiling, the pilasters in two orders, the polychrome flagstone floor. And he was frank about the Codrington bequest that built the library having been one of those sugar fortunes. It illustrated for me what Said meant about colonialism and humanism existing side by side in British history.
I thought it odd nevertheless that Britain seemed to tell itself that black people only got to its shores in 1948, with the HMT Empire Windrush, the ship that brought more than five hundred workers, many war veterans, from the West Indies, an emigration remembered for the virulence of prejudice it exposed in the United Kingdom. It was as though British people had never asked themselves what had happened to the Africans who lived in London or Bristol in the eighteenth century. Probably more people in the United Kingdom have black ancestors than they know. In any case, Commonwealth citizens weren’t entitled to become British subjects after Parliament imposed restrictions on immigration in 1962.
In the late 1960s, I used to point out to my father that there had been three Race Relations Acts passed by Parliament, much like our Civil Rights Acts. Moreover, I’d read in a history of the British overseas that enslaved black people ran away from their American masters to join the British in the War of 1812. My father replied that I should look up when Parliament got around to abolishing slavery. Three decades before we did, I countered, thinking I’d scored. By the time I made my first trip to London as a teenager, I was already a master at not noticing racial slights, so much so that one bus conductor, a couple of waiters and doormen, and a cheap-hotel-manageress type had to exaggerate their behavior in order to make plain to me that they were insulting me on racial grounds. There were too many welcoming hippies with houseboats in London for me to care, but maybe I internalized something of that “rivers of blood” mood, because years after that first trip I noticed that I was nervous in the United Kingdom in a way that I was not in Berlin.
I’d see black people on the streets of central London—a protest took place every day in front of Zimbabwe House on the Strand—and then there’d be hardly any of us in the theater audience or restaurant that evening. A sweet-tempered critic who didn’t know that he was embarrassing us said two black people went to Covent Garden, and he knew both of us. I didn’t laugh, and when I addressed as “Madam” the black woman he was also referring to, she rounded on me with “I hate that.” The Royal Academy had a fascinating exhibition, African Art, and I’m not saying that those old white women looking at the sculptures knew nothing about Africa, but I saw only two other black people besides me there. The same exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York had black families swarming all over it. Those many years ago, black Americans could cross a psychological threshold that black people in the United Kingdom had not as yet, or so I surmised. On the other hand, Henry Louis Gates Jr. gave the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford in 1992, and the hall was packed with black students. I wondered where they’d come from. I’d never seen so many blacks in one place in Oxford. Perhaps Cory Booker, then a Rhodes scholar, was among them.
There was one black man in the House of Lords and fewer than a dozen black members of the House of Commons. A black man stood as the Conservative candidate for Cheltenham, a safe constituency, in 1992. He lost, the first time since 1910 that the Conservatives hadn’t won the seat. The black man wept on camera, and though he went up to the House of Lords eventually, his life became something of a Christian mess thereafter. The number of ethnic members, a good percentage of them women, has since grown, but not by much.
In the United Kingdom, it’s always class, people said. The elegantly suited, perfectly coiffed black wife of a Scottish grandee refused to meet my eye at a lunch party. I even went out one door and around to another in order to cross her path, but she still managed not to notice me—NQOCD. This wasn’t a case of one black not spoiling the hustle of another black in front of white people; this was old-fashioned class disdain. In the United States
, the shared goal of attaining equal rights had always dissolved class lines, but maybe that had become a sentimental notion, in the way that I still expected a black person to acknowledge another black person, in a setting where there weren’t any other blacks, as a gesture of solidarity.
Heinemann’s African Writers Series led me when I was a student from Senghor to Ngũgĩ, from Ekwensi to Soyinka, Achebe, and Mahfouz. One of the campus cult novels, Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door, wasn’t African literature but was published by a small firm, Allison & Busby, founded in 1967. Allison was white, but Margaret Busby was the first black woman publisher in the United Kingdom. The Allison & Busby list included C.L.R James, George Lamming, Roy Heath, Buchi Emecheta, Nuruddin Farah, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Ralph de Boissière. Literature in English had become an international literature—Walcott, Naipaul, Gordimer, Rushdie, Coetzee, Kincaid—and not every nonwhite writer was black. But I tended to view it as a literature of exile, because its stories, mostly about where the writers came from, were, for the most part, written in an elsewhere.
I hadn’t thought before about the sheer diversity of the black population in Great Britain. The Commonwealth was a bill come due. Africa was an invention of European aggression, Pan-Africanists taught us. Tribes, languages, nations on the Continent were forged into a single identity. Even so, Nigerians were not Ghanaians, Kenyans were not South Africans, just as someone from Jamaica was not someone from Trinidad. A contact at the Africa Centre in London explained that an economic migrant didn’t have the same life as an exile, and in many black communities this was also a generational difference, with the older political refugees in a limbo that could go on for years, intent on events back home, while their children had made the United Kingdom their home. White Britons were becoming aware that there were black Britons, second- and third-generation, not going back anywhere. However, in 1993, six white youths attacked a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, at a London bus stop. He was stabbed to death. It was the sort of case the press said shocked the nation, but it took nearly a decade to convict anyone of his murder.
The novelist Caryl Phillips came to the United Kingdom from St. Kitts as an infant and grew up in Leeds. When he was a boy, white football fans would make monkey sounds when a black player came onto the pitch. Phillips looks like an Igbo prince but talks like the Yorkshireman he is. He has written about his determination when a student at Oxford to read African-American literature. Everybody’s looking for something, the song goes.
I was shown the oak bookcases and painted panels in the ceiling of Duke Humfrey’s Library in the Bodleian, and sometimes the library catalog sent me over to the Radcliffe Camera, the small, round eighteenth-century neoclassical library building not far away. I went to the library in Rhodes House and tried to find certain books there. Howard University philosopher Alain Locke, the editor of the anthology The New Negro that in 1925 declared the Harlem Renaissance a movement, was in 1907 the first black Rhodes scholar but was refused admittance to some Oxford colleges, until Hertford College offered him a place.
Du Bois didn’t like Locke, and though the poet Sterling Brown had respect for him, he laughed at Locke’s Philadelphia upper-class uptightness, saying in an interview that if someone was playing the blues outside Locke’s window, he’d slam it shut and put on Tchaikovsky. Locke was queer, bow-tie-wearing queer, and that perhaps shaded some attitudes toward him. He pursued the young Langston Hughes across France into Italy and back. Legend has it that after Locke’s death, a vial was discovered among his papers that was supposed to contain Hughes’s sperm. Whenever I heard this story, the vials multiplied, until poor Locke, the critical pragmatist, had left fifty-two cloudy containers behind. He was brave in his way, venturing that black people and white people actually had great spiritual need of one another.
The Bodleian was not a library of record for works published in North America, and what Blackwell’s bookstore across Broad Street didn’t have, or what hadn’t come to me from storage, I could find in London, pausing behind this or that chair to see who had sat where in the Reading Room, now preserved under the glass roof in the Great Court of the British Museum. And when the British Library opened in St. Pancras in 1997, I’d have a last cigarette or two on the street and go in. The staff was friendly, everyone probably deeply eccentric, I wanted to think. Librarians and a Masonic adhesiveness. I had my spot in a rare-books room. I said that books were a voyage, a trip to something I had not known before, but they also became hiding places as the bulletins from Indianapolis got worse.
* * *
In the autumn of 2002, I was waiting at a commuter station in Oxfordshire for a woman I’d not met. A “woody wagon” pulled up, and a woman of a certain age got out, saw me, and asked if I was who I was. Yes. Are you Mrs. Spink? No, but I heard you’d be here. A vintage Land Rover pulled up, and four people got out, saw me, and asked if I was who I was. Yes. Mrs. Spink? No, but we heard you’d be here. The writer Susanna Johnston had arranged for me to travel with Penny Spink and some people from the Old Berkshire Hunt up to London for the march sponsored by the Countryside Alliance, an organization formed in 1997 to lobby for rural interests in the United Kingdom. I’d been vetted and described. The Telegraph headline that morning: PRINCE CHARLES: “FARMERS HAVE IT WORSE THAN BLACKS AND GAYS.”
It was like class warfare from 1910, the anger against hunting. I could see it in the faces of some onlookers in a village when the hunt I’d followed at the end of the season trotted through. The horses were huge and beautiful, the riders perched high above us. Some diplomatically doffed their hats, but it was too late for manners. I caught a ride in a farm vehicle to an observation ridge. I watched the classicist Robin Lane Fox in his scarlet coat gallop across a green field on his charger when the pack had gone away. I made my way into the valley on foot and heard the hounds’ excitement as they cornered the quarry in the trees. The fox was torn apart, and I was nearly ritualistically bloodied, but the master presented me with the fox’s tail instead. I was in a Mitford novel, or one by Waugh. My father remarked dryly, “By the way, do you ride?”
In London, the march for Liberty and Livelihood started in the sunshine from Hyde Park corner. I saw demonstrators in various getups, from hunting attire to foxes’ heads. The many thousands were boisterous, and from everywhere came the sound of calls on hunting horns. We hiked through St. James, and along Pall Mall people cheered from windows. Penny Spink was concerned that the toffs had turned the day into a party. Class difference was easy to spot, not only in the way the people were dressed—tartan and tweed here, overalls and wellies there—but in their demeanor. Farmers were quiet, in earnest. I spoke briefly to a young black woman who hadn’t much to say to me about her rural life. I thanked her anyway, and she cut ahead of the famously bushy eyebrows of the Duke of Westminster. The march was so large, we couldn’t get into Parliament Square. It had taken us so long to get there, it was already lunchtime.
We ended up in Pratt’s, a venerable gentleman’s club in a very old house off St. James’s Street. I have a dim memory of enormous pike mounted in glass cases. There was a billiards room and a small dining room down several steps in the basement. A young lady—Georgina, they called her; the steward, I found out later—greeted us and took care of us. Someone in the party explained to me that the male staff were all called “George,” and the young lady was therefore “Georgina.”
In 1925, A. Philip Randolph founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first black union in the United States. The porters were all black, and they were all addressed as “George.” Their struggle with the Pullman Company over working conditions on its trains took years and was bitter. In the end, the union was recognized. One of its demands was that the porters not be called “George” anymore. They wanted name tags. No one could say where the custom of calling the porters “George” had originated. I put down my fork and announced to the table that they had solved for me a mystery in the history of black American labor. The Pullman Compan
y and its sleeping cars became famous thanks to Lincoln’s funeral in 1865. The company was proud of the luxury travel it offered. Someone must have decided to call staff “George” in imitation of how things were done at a select London club, getting it somewhat wrong, because the vibe of Pratt’s was not luxury.
No one at the table had any idea what I was talking about. I changed the subject, asking if anyone knew what had really happened to Lord Lucan, the peer who disappeared in 1974 after the battered body of his children’s nanny was discovered in his basement.
Not long after the Liberty march, I was in a much larger demonstration that moved in the opposite direction, from Parliament Square to Hyde Park. It was a protest against going to war with Iraq. People who had never marched for anything before were taking part. Protests were being mounted around the world. The march in London was so large, the rear of it hadn’t arrived before the scheduled end of the event. The mood was in stark contrast to the Countryside march. This was not a party. Our voices counted for nothing. War came.
Expatriatism was not a metaphysical condition, I told myself one early evening while watching the fields blur in the twilight, fields behind the path through the woods that Matthew Arnold took to Bablock Hythe when composing “The Scholar-Gipsy.” I’d been taught to read as though books held keys or were guides. I depended on them to tell me where I was and what to do.
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 30