Still Grazing

by Hugh Masikela

  In my class, I got very close to Astley Fennel, Larry Willis, and Fielder Floyd. It turned out that Larry played a little jazz piano. We hung out a lot at Astley’s place in the Bronx, where he lived with his widowed Jamaican dad. They had an old piano, and Larry would accompany Astley and me on piano on popular bebop and blues compositions, plus some American standards. Astley had a tin ear, but we hung with him mostly because of the piano at his house. Larry, on the other hand, had great potential.

  Fielder and I were sworn disciples of Clifford Brown. We spent a lot of time trading the great trumpeter’s phrases and gushing over his incredible prowess on the horn. Fielder was rooming with Marcus Belgrave, who played lead trumpet in the Ray Charles band and had been a personal friend of Clifford’s. He was also close to Brown’s family in Wilmington, Delaware, a stone’s throw away from his home in Chester, Pennsylvania. Marcus and Fielder shared an apartment around 158th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Washington Heights, where we went after school to pick up pointers from Marcus and ask millions of questions about Clifford Brown. The two trumpeters usually lit up a joint and offered me a drag, but I always cordially declined. From time to time I would notice them going into a nod and rubbing their noses furiously, but at first it didn’t occur to me that they were on heroin—their behavior wasn’t nearly as severe as that of the addicts I saw nodding on the sidewalks of Harlem around the Apollo Theater. When I first saw those cats, I asked Leslie what kind of booze they were drinking and she said, “That ain’t no booze, honey. Those motherfuckers are falling over from shooting heroin.” I had never heard of heroin before that. When it finally dawned on me that Marcus and Fieldler were knocking themselves out with H, I was quietly shocked, but I never said anything to either of them. About seven years later, Fielder Floyd died from a heroin overdose.

  Jane and Mburumba often brought their children, Kakuna and Mandume, to Miriam’s apartment for me to babysit while they went out to one reception or another. Sometimes when Leslie and Jean stayed over with Bongi, I would go to the Kerina flat and babysit there. The Kerinas became like family to me—they were generous and funny and a total joy to be with. Of course, their home cooking and wonderful leftovers gave Bongi and me a very good reason to stop over regularly for a quick hello and good-bye, with the full knowledge that Jane would insist that we sit down and have a quick bite to eat. But their house had more than good eating; I also met many prominent political scientists and activists through the Kerinas, among them the great African-American writer John Henrik Clarke, who was also a radical scholar of international African politics and one of America’s foremost civil rights authors and teachers. Then there was the prolific author John Killens; artist/sculptor John Peoples; author Louis Lomax; and Namibian freedom fighters like Kozonguizi, Sam Nujoma, and Ben Gurirab, who were presenting petitions at the United Nations on behalf of their people. Discussions at the Kerina household could go on into the early mornings, with heated confrontations between parties holding different opinions on protest, racism, history, genetics, philosophy, psychology, and liberation.

  One night when we popped over, Lomax was holding court. He had just published a book in which he argued that even though he had African blood in his veins, the fact was that he was light-skinned and his closest forebears were of German origin, which made him more a white man than a Negro.

  John Henrik Clarke, John Killens, Miriam Makeba, Maya Angelou, Vusi Make, Leslie Reed, Jean Johnson, and a few Africans were at the Kerinas for this discussion. Even though everybody tore into Louis Lomax with scathing and sometimes venomous criticism, he would not stand down. “You are a disgrace to the black race,” someone would hiss at him. But Louis Lomax, in his Brooks Brothers suit, Ivy League cordovans, and horn-rimmed glasses, his charcoal-gray, semi-straight hair carefully groomed, would sit back in his chair, flash a very confident smile, and reply, “How can I be a disgrace to a group of people I don’t belong to in any manner of speaking?”—a question to which the gathering found it very difficult to come up with a rebuttal except for the stock phrases like “Look in the mirror,” or “One drop of black blood makes you a black man,” or “Go to the South, hug a white man or kiss a white woman, and let’s see how many hours you’ll live after that.”

  Lomax would fire back, “Many white civil rights activists have been murdered in the South. I wouldn’t be the first. Stop being racist and emotional. Give me some logical answers.” It was a useless case, but Lomax was a grand provocateur—I was still trying to figure out where I fit into all of this, so I just sat back and watched the show. He went on to conduct live debates on television with Malcolm X, other black activists and a number of white conservatives, and with Southern racists who thought he was just a crazy ole nigra.

  Even outside of the Kerinas’ house, I found myself surrounded by people who were revolutionaries—whether they were African or American, artists or activists, it all seemed to come together magically at that moment. Miriam took me to a party at the home of Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach in honor of Vusi Make and his wife, Maya Angelou. Maya was starring in an off-Broadway production of Jean Genet’s play The Blacks. Bra Vusi, as we called him back home, had worked at Drum magazine and then become a fiery antiapartheid orator in the Vereeniging township of Evaton and its environs. When Robert Sobukwe was detained for treason and sent to Robben Island for life after his death sentence was commuted, Vusi was one of the people from the Pan-African Congress’s leadership who went abroad for military leadership training. Vusi ended up in Ghana, where he met Maya. They returned to the United States together—she to pursue her acting career, he to make representations at the United Nations and establish solidarity with American civil rights movements and other activists who were passionate about the liberation of people of the African Diaspora.

  Mburumba took me to Harlem one day when he had an appointment with Malcolm X at the Muslim-run restaurant on 116th Street. Harlem always gripped my soul in a kindred kind of way. It reminded me of the communal vibes I experienced in Sophiatown and Alexandra. Just as the townships were cultural kaleidoscopes and key political meeting places for the ANC in South Africa, Harlem, a black metropolis, was the magnet for intellectuals, artists, musicians, black nationalists, and Pan-Africanists. A few years later Langston Hughes invited me to his home in Harlem. Hughes told me that in 1923 he had traveled by freighter to Senegal, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Belgian Congo, Angola, and Guinea. His first published poem was also his most famous. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was written when he was only nineteen:

  I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

  My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

  I’ve bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

  I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

  I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

  I heard the singing of the Mississippi …

  He gave me a book of his poems that moved me so much I wrote a song to one of them, “Night Owl.”

  Contrary to the angry, hostile image the white conservative press had painted of Malcolm X, in person he was handsome, hospitable, and witty—and gifted with an ability to gain your intimacy immediately; Malcolm spoke to me as if he had known me all his life. Following a lengthy conversation, he stood and gave me a firm, brotherly handshake. “One day soon, all your leaders will come out of jail to rule your country and bring peace, love, and joy to your people.” His words were not unfamiliar—lots of American activists shared similar sentiments with me all the time—but for some reason, coming from him, they struck me as more prophetic than kind and reassuring. In that era, Malcolm was in the rare company of Miles Davis, Harry Belafonte, Martin Luther King, and Sidney Poitier, an African-American man who seemed to be completely unintimidated by any kind of white people, racist or liberal. His first definition of himself was as a man, one who was only black by biological happenstance and equal in all ways to any man on earth. It was onl
y when people came on as though they were better than he was that he didn’t waste time putting them in their place. Malcolm X commanded awesome respect even from people who usually felt superior around blacks. He became, from that moment forward, a model for me of how a man of African origin should project.

  When Thanksgiving came around, Miriam took Bongi with her to California, where she was on the road with Belafonte. I was left alone in New York. I really had a rough time understanding the logic of Thanksgiving, watching people become suddenly feverish about buying turkeys. Marcus Belgrave persuaded me to come to Chester, Pennsylvania, with him and Fielder for the long holiday weekend. We boarded a Greyhound bus in New York, and three hours later we were in tiny Chester. We walked from the terminal to Marcus’s home, a few hundred yards away, where his extended family was waiting. As soon as we got to the house, they were all over us, happy to see old Marcus and “mighty glad” that he had brought Fielder and me for Thanksgiving.

  Marcus’s family was from the South, so Fielder was no surprise to them. They were more than fascinated, however, with a real live African. They bombarded me with an unrelenting stream of questions. I was shocked at how little Americans knew about the continent I came from. They believed the outrageous, stereotypical bullshit about Africans still living in the Stone Age gathered from Tarzan films, Nyoka the Jungle Girl, Jungle Jim cinema serials, comic books, and other ignorant portrayals. Black Americans seemed to have been programmed to avoid and deny any historical or genealogical connection with Africa. The majority of them were always quick to say, “No, I ain’t got nothin’ to do with Africa, man! I’m pure, full-blooded American. You better believe it. Yeah, boy!”

  However, most of those from the South were totally different. They easily saw how much we had in common; some recalled their grandparents’ folk-tales, which preserved a connection to Africa. Marcus’s parents and aunts and uncles told me about how their own parents had been members of Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Movement, which was cruelly sabotaged by the government’s intelligence community during the height of the “Back to Africa” campaign. Many had contributed substantial amounts of their earnings over many years so that they could be part of Garvey’s revivalist crusade, only to be disappointed when he was systematically railroaded by the American government and totally destroyed. When he was finally jailed on some trumped-up charges, many who had hoped that the “Back to Africa” dream would become a reality were deeply disappointed. Nevertheless, it was encouraging to discover that many African-Americans did not buy the “Africans are savages” propaganda. I found out that a considerable percentage of this community were informed about what was happening in Africa, especially older people with a Southern background and those who had taken it upon themselves to do intensive research on the history of the continent and its people.

  It was understandable that there would be such ignorance about Africa in the Western world. There was clearly a concerted effort by the conservative establishment to ensure that people who had African or Native American ancestry knew as little as possible about their history—the past was a portal into anger. On the other hand, we Africans were peddled a vision of blacks in the Americas that suggested they were living the high life—all we ever saw were artists surrounded by glitter and glamour. It came as a shock to my generation, who came to the West in the 1950s and 1960s, to find that wherever black people lived—Europe, the Caribbean, America—they were surrounded mostly by poverty, bigotry, squalor, crime, discrimination, and institutionalized murder. This left many of us wildly disillusioned, but it was also the beginning, for many of us, of a commitment to forge solidarity with these communities.

  Marcus Belgrave came from a tightly knit, working-class family. Marcus, Fielder, and I shared a bedroom with three beds on the third floor of their old but sturdy Colonial-style house, which had large downstairs lounges, a wraparound porch, huge landscaped gardens, and a large kitchen that bustled with oversized women cooking beans, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, stuffing, rice, hominy grits, cornbread, black-eyed peas, turkeys, hams, gumbo, ribs, sauces, pumpkins, cobblers, cakes, cranberry sauce, and everything else that came with the holiday. The kitchen rang with laughter and gossip, while the men settled on the porch to down one beer after another, drink whiskey, gin, brandy, rum, wine, watch television around the clock, and argue wildly about the state of the world with the little knowledge they had at their command. I was grilled endlessly by preschoolers and octogenarians and everyone in between about Africa.

  “What’d y’all eat over there?”

  “Y’all got telebision?”

  “When’d you learn to speak English so good?”

  “You always wore dese clothes an’ shoes?”

  “Y’all have cars and roads over dere?”

  “When y’all gone throw all dem white folks outta dere?”

  “D’ y’all have fruits and d’ y’all live in houses?”

  “What yo’ daddy do for a livin’?”

  “You write yo’ mama?”

  “How you like it in America?”

  “Y’all go to church?”

  “Where’d you learn to play music?”

  “Show me some a y’all’s dances.”

  Later that evening, Fielder listened to me as I continued talking about my home. With a cynical smile on his face, he said to me, “Tell me somethin’, man, how come you talking like a white man all de time?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, rather surprised.

  “Man, you always talking dat-tap-de-rap-de-tap kinda shit, man. Why can’t you talk like no black man? How come you ain’t talking like me and Marcus, man?”

  It took some fifteen minutes to try to explain my background, how English wasn’t even my language and that I had only been speaking it daily for less than a year.

  “Shit, man, that’s wild! What you been talking all dis time?”

  “Oh,” I answered, “Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, Ndebele, Afrikaans, Pedi, Shangaan.”

  “Wait a minute,” Marcus jumped in. “You mean to tell me that you speak all them languages?” Before I could answer, Fielder said, “Say somethin’ in dat shit that sounds like you hittin’ two woodblocks together, man.”

  I said some words in Xhosa, and they were mesmerized. Some were laughing, some wanted to look inside my mouth. All of them were trying to imitate me. The laughter started all over again as they hopelessly tried to click their tongues like me.

  “Shit, man, that’s some wild shit. How’d you do dat? Tell you what, you teach me how to do dat shit wid yo’ mouth like you poppin’ a cork off a bottle, and I’ll teach you how to talk like a black man, okay?”

  “Okay,” I answered Fielder, as he and the others couldn’t stop breaking up from trying the Xhosa clicks. “Sheet, maan, do dat again. Hey momma, come hear what Hugh’s language sound like. Hey, Hughie, talk dat stuff again.”

  Marcus’s folks were all stunned when I rattled off a sentence that was full of all kinds of clicks. “Well, I’ll be damned,” said one of his uncles. “Child, y’all talk like dat back home? Well, Lawd help me out. Hey Lawanda, come down here and listen how dis chile talking dat talk from down where he come from.” The fascination about my strange tongues went on past midnight.

  The next morning Marcus, Fielder, and I took a twenty-minute train trip to Wilmington, Delaware, to visit Clifford Brown’s home, where I got to meet my hero’s widow and son. They were fascinated by the fact that I had idolized Clifford from so far away and had taken the trouble to come and see his home. I was treated like a long-lost relation. I was also introduced to Clifford’s trumpet teacher, who tried to explain his tutoring methods, but I was too sad thinking about Clifford to even understand what he was trying to say.

  We continued on to Philadelphia, where Marcus knew lots of musicians, and we spent most of that afternoon and early evening jamming with them. We worked over Miles Davis compositions like “So What” and “Milestones,” standards like “How High the Moon,” “All the Thin
gs You Are,” “Cherokee,” and “Body and Soul,” Charlie Parker’s “Straight No Chaser,” Duke Ellington’s “A Train” and “Perdido”; the list is endless. The sixties were the golden age of jam sessions—they were very competitive, all about separating the boys from the men when it came to fast tempos and intricate chord structures. They also helped us all get with the latest songs and innovations. This was how word got around quickly if there was a talented new musician on the scene. The sessions were a kind of information service about new talent as well as informal jazz workshops. It was a wonderful day for me, and word got around on the East Coast bebop grapevine that there was a bad lil’ trumpet player from Africa who sounded a lil’ bit like Clifford Brown.

  Thanksgiving 1960 was my introduction to African-American family life. “Y’all be sure to come back an’ visit again, y’ hear? Don’ forgit to write yo’ mama,” said Marcus’s mother, hugging me tightly with a wet kiss on my cheek. “Be sho’ to tell her you was wid us over Thanksgivin’. It’ll make her feel good to know ya had a decent home-cooked meal.” Most of Marcus’s siblings and cousins walked with us to the bus terminal and bade us farewell with all kinds of screams and hollers. When the bus pulled off, some of them were screaming unintelligible Zulu and Xhosa words, popping their fingers inside their mouths to make a clicking sound and laughing hysterically. By the time we pulled into New York’s Port Authority Terminal at 42nd street, I was talking like a black man and Fielder was “’sho proud” that he could understand “what de fuck” I was sayin’.

  Back in New York, I had Miriam’s apartment to myself. I was spending most of my time at the Kerinas’ in between going to school, babysitting, club-hopping with Fielder and Marcus, jamming uptown with Larry Willis and bassist Eddie Gomez, trumpeter Larry Hall, drummers Al Foster and Henry Jenkins, and other ex-members of the Music and Arts High School youth band, who were now attending Eastman, Juilliard, or the Manhattan School of Music. Larry and I were regulars at John Mehegan’s jazz workshops on the Juilliard campus, and John was now giving him private lessons. Larry was beginning to play the hell out of the piano.