Brother West

by Cornel West

  IT WAS NOT ONLY PROGRESSIVE INTELLECTUALS like Edward Said whom I encouraged to come to Princeton, but conservative figures as well. The most prominent of these was Rush Limbaugh.

  I was in my office as director of Afro-American Studies when late one afternoon the phone rang.

  “Professor West, this is Rush Limbaugh. I just want you to know that I have contacted virtually every Ivy League university in this country, requesting a debate with whomever they choose. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that I have been rejected at every turn. So it is with small hope that I make one final request. Would you, Professor, agree to a public debate?”

  “Dear Brother Rush, my brother Clifton and our friend Bob back in Sacramento have been talking about you. I’d be delighted to host a serious and substantive debate with you.”

  Rush seemed flabbergasted and quite interested. When scheduling conflicts prevented the debate, I was disappointed. But I also have to point out that for the next twenty-plus years, with all the attacks and assaults on leftist intellectuals, Brother Rush has never said a bad word about me. In fact, the only time he ever mentioned me on his show was—believe it or not—when he agreed with me.

  “THE WAY YOU DO

  THE THINGS YOU DO ”

  KATHLEEN BATTLE SANG THE FIRST LINE: “You got a smile so bright … ”

  I sang the second: “You know you could have been a candle … ”

  Carly Simon sang the next line: “I’m holding you so tight … ”

  Kathleen: “You know you could have been a handle … ”

  Corn: “The way you swept me off my feet … ”

  Carly: “You know you could have been a broom … ”

  Kathleen: “The way you smell so sweet … ”

  Corn: “You know you could have been some perfume.”

  Carly: “Well, you could have been anything that you wanted to … ”

  Kathleen: “And I can tell … ”

  All: “The way you do the things you do.”

  It was the summer of 1988, and we were all gathered around the grand piano at Carly Simon’s home on Martha’s Vineyard. The air was sweet and the songs were sweeter. It was a thrill to know that Kathleen, the magnificent coloratura soprano, and Carly Simon, the wonderful pop vocalist, knew the song that Smokey Robinson had written for the Temptations as well as I did. I relished the moment. By then, Kathleen and I had fallen in love.

  We had met in the spring. Kathleen had given a magnificent recital at Carnegie Hall, and I was blessed to be in the audience. I was riveted, not only by the sheer beauty of her voice, but the majestic beauty of her person. As best I recall, she sang Handel and Mozart. My head swam with melody, my spirit excited by the emotional power and delicacy of her interpretations. I was transported. I saw her standing there—a statuesque woman of rare delicacy and unquestioned dignity, a brown angel.

  Mutual friends introduced us after the recital. That evening we had a late dinner. We had instant rapport. She had grown up in the black church; her roots were gospel. In fact, she would later invite me to speak at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Portsmouth, Ohio, the sanctuary where she had sung as a child and where her family still worshipped. That was a singular thrill.

  We had worlds in common—not only our passion for classical music, but rhythm-and-blues and Broadway as well. Kathleen had an easy laugh and beautiful outlook on life. She was bright, curious, and sophisticated in a way I never would be. Because she was constantly traveling the world, she had firsthand familiarity with political and social issues of countries from all over the globe. Her facility with foreign languages was amazing and her understanding of foreign cultures deep and compassionate.

  I also loved her self-confidence. I saw in Kathleen a free black woman who maintained her sense of strong identity no matter the circumstance. She is unquestionably a diva in the best sense of that term, but I never saw any arrogance in her bearing, only a self-assuredness that had been earned over an illustrious career and was expressed with grace and charm.

  Our initial dinner led to a second, and then a third. I then began traveling with her as she performed in Ann Arbor, Pittsburgh, Boston, Washington, D.C., and other cities. Every second or third night, I was treated to still another Kathleen Battle recital. When they called me “Mr. Battle,” I smiled. Couldn’t have cared less. I was there to carry her bags, and happy to do so. Honored to do so. To others, she was a radiant star. To me, she was a sugarsweet down-home sister. We brought out the best in each other. One night she was singing in The Barber of Seville. The next night Luciano Pavarotti would cook us a gourmet meal.

  At the end of her American tour, she was off to Europe for the rest of the summer. “I’ll see you after the Salzburg Festival, Cornel,” she said.

  But I wanted to see Kathleen and I wanted to see Salzburg, so as a surprise I showed up for her fortieth birthday in Austria. Her performance was sublime and our time in the mansion of Herbert von Karajan was beyond this world.

  Back home, I invited her to Princeton, where she heard me lecture and sat in on several classes. I introduced Kathleen to Toni Morrison and suggested that they collaborate. They did, and the magnificent result is Honey and Rue, lyrics by Toni, music by André Previn. It’s an original song cycle connected to the African American experience. It was released on record and debuted at Carnegie Hall.

  In New York, Roberta Flack invited us to her apartment at the Dakota, where we stood around the grand piano and sang Supremes songs. Kathleen also took me to Carnegie Hall to see what would be Maestro Herbert von Karajan’s last performance. By then he had become my friend and invited me to stand in the wings to watch him conduct Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. By the time he put down the baton, he was so depleted that he couldn’t walk. I carried him off the stage.

  Kathleen and I built up memories to last a lifetime. She introduced me to the opera legend Jessye Norman, whom I then introduced to Toni Morrison. I shall never forget Jessye’s first words to Toni: “Ms. Morrison, all my life I’ve wanted to be you and like you.”

  “And all my life, Jessye,” Toni replied, “I’ve wanted to be you and like you.”

  Kathleen also introduced me to two fabulous maestros: the inimitable James Levine—her mentor from Cincinnati, Ohio— and the famous conductor Christoph von Dohnányi. Dohnányi and I spoke late into the night about the life and death of his godfather, the uncompromising German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer. When Bonhoeffer, who had once joined a plot to kill Hitler, came to study at Union Theological Seminary, he regularly attended services at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. The German spiritual radical testified that it was the rich black church worship that enabled him to feel the full joy of Jesus.

  No doubt, Kathleen and I had a powerful and abiding love for one another. We longed to be together all the time. But we also couldn’t deny the reality of our different lives and different obligations. We were on different paths moving in different directions. It became increasingly difficult for me to get away. Same for Kathleen. The pull of our professions was strong. And that pull, of course, wasn’t fueled by a sense of mere obligation—it was pulled by passion. Kathleen had to sing. I had to teach. We had to go our separate ways. And yet we remained connected—and still do—by mutual respect and powerful love.

  AS THE ’80S SPILLED INTO THE ’90s, I began a series of dialogues with the wonderful bell hooks who, I said, “writes with a deep sense of urgency about the existential and psycho-cultural dimensions of African American life—especially those spiritual and intimate issues of love, hurt, pain, envy, and desire usually probed by artists.” The result of our in-depth conversations was a book we coauthored, named Breakin’ Bread, a title that refers to friends chatting over a good meal as well as the delicious song by Fred Wesley—called “Breakin’ Bread,” of course—that has to do with a critical recovery and revision of one’s past. We lectured together all over the country on this book. We had worked together at Yale and had danced toget
her in clubs like Brick ’n’ Wood in New Haven in the early ’80s.

  bell and I spoke about a wide expanse of subjects. Thinking about my new position at Princeton, I said, “Afro-American studies was never meant to be solely for Afro-Americans. It was meant to try to redefine what it means to be human, what it means to be modern, what it means to be American, because people of African descent in this country are profoundly human, profoundly modern, profoundly American.”

  When bell asked what the essence was of my recently published book, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, I answered that it was “an interpretation of the emergency, the sustenance, and the decline of American civilization from the vantage point of an African American. It means that we have to have a cosmopolitan orientation, even though it is rooted in the fundamental concern with the plight and predicaments of African Americans.”

  I went on to argue “that there are fundamental themes, like experimentation and improvisation, that can be found in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, that are thoroughly continuous with the great art form that Afro-Americans have given the modern world, which is jazz. And therefore to talk about America is to talk about improvisation and experimentation, and therefore to talk about Emerson and Louis Armstrong in the same breath.”

  I told the story of the cultural and political significance of the major native philosophic tradition in America best represented by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Sidney Hook, C. Wright Mills, W.E.B. Du Bois, Reinhold Niebuhr, Lionel Trilling, W. V. Quine, Richard Rorty, and Roberto Unger. My own prophetic pragmatism was the culminating point of the story.

  bell and I talked about suffering. I’d once told Bill Moyers that I saw the vocation of the intellectual as an endless quest for truth in which we allow suffering to speak. In that light, I spoke of jazz and blues encompassing “a profound sense of the tragic-comic linked to human agency, so that it does not wallow in a cynicism or a paralyzing pessimism, but it also is realistic enough to project a sense of hope. It’s a matter of responding in an improvisational, undogmatic, creative way to these instances in such a way that people still survive and thrive.”

  These were public talks that had us determined to offer ourselves, in bell’s words, “as living examples of the will on the part of both black men and women to talk with one another, to process, and engage in rigorous intellectual and political dialogue.”

  “At a time when there are so many storms raging and winds blowing through black male and female relations, it is important to at least take a moment and look, see, examine, question, and scrutinize a particular black male intellectual and a particular black female intellectual who are grappling together, struggling together, rooted in a very rich black tradition but also critical of that tradition such that the best of the tradition can remain alive.”

  That was me and bell, talking about everything and everyone from Spike Lee to Eddie Murphy to the songs of Babyface, processing what was happening in our popular culture—and why—as well as trying to understand the profundity of the works of our literary heavy-hitters like Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. When bell pointed to the grandmother’s sermon on the necessity of love in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, I called it “one of the great moments in modern literature. You don’t find that kind of sermon in Wright or Baldwin or Ellison. There’s a depth for black humanity which is both affirmed and enacted that, I think, speaks very deeply to these spiritual issues. And I think this relates precisely to the controversy in the relations between black men and women.”

  “Cornel,” asked bell, “what does it mean for a progressive black male on the Left to ally himself with the critique of patriarchy and sexism, to be supportive of the feminist movement?”

  “We have to recognize that there cannot be relationships unless there is commitment, unless there is loyalty, unless there is love, patience, persistence. Now, the degree to which these values are eroding is the degree to which there cannot be healthy relationships. And if there are no relationships then there is only the joining of people for the purpose of bodily stimulation.

  “And if we live in a society in which these very values are eroding, then it’s no accident that we are going to see fewer and fewer qualitative relationships between black men and women.

  “At the same time—and this is one reason why I think many black men and women are at each other’s throats—there exists a tremendous sense of inadequacy and rage in black men, just as exists a tremendous sense of inadequacy and rage in black women.”

  A little later in our dialogue, bell said, “I think we also have to break away from the bourgeois tradition of romantic love, which isn’t necessarily about creating conditions for what you call critical confirmation. And I think this produces a lot of the tensions between heterosexual black men and black women, and between gays. We must think of not just romantic love, but of love in general as being about people mutually meeting each other’s needs and giving and receiving critical feedback.”

  “That’s true,” I agreed. “We actually see some of the best of this in the traditions of contemporary Africa that has a more deromanticized, or less romanticized, conception of relationship, talking more about partnership. I know this from my loving Ethiopian wife.”

  It is dangerous to make broad generalizations about the rich diversity of African culture. But it is safe to say that less romantic conceptions of love do prevail there.

  During the winter of 1990, in the courthouse in Rockville, Maryland just north of D.C.—a community known as the Reno of the East—for the third time in my life I asked a woman for her hand in marriage. I was overjoyed when she accepted. I was thirty-seven.

  AFRICAN DREAMS

  To the love of my life, my precious wife

  Elleni Gebre Amlakheir

  of a great family and civilization of faith

  and harbinger of hope to come

  THIS WAS THE DEDICATION IN THE BOOK I wrote called Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America, published in 1993 and recently reissued as a Routledge Classics. The experience of recommitting myself to the courtship of Elleni was a long process but one that I could never abandon. We had broken up before I began seeing Kathleen, but when that relationship proved impossible on a longrange basis, I realized that I couldn’t forget Elleni. I had loved her once. I had, in fact, never stopped loving her. I had to see her. I started flying down to Tampa, where she was working as a waitress and was still in hiding from her obsessed suitor. I flew to Florida every two weeks. I begged her to relocate somewhere closer to me. She agreed to Rockville, a reasonable drive from Princeton. We were back together at last. Soon I was able to convince her to leave Maryland, and marry and live with me in New Jersey.

  Heaven. This was the marriage. This was the woman. This was the soulmate I had been seeking. This was the spouse with whom I would share my life. This was domestic stability, romantic excitement, and spiritual fulfillment. This was right.

  As an Eastern Orthodox Ethiopian, Elleni wanted us to travel to her motherland and be married in church. I was all for it. By the late ’80s, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front had mostly collapsed. The country had been ravaged by economic catastrophe and political corruption, not to mention deadly retribution to all those who opposed the Communist regime. There was reason to be hopeful, and it seemed that we would be welcome in Addis Ababa, former home of my wife and her mother. The plan was to hold the ceremony in the grand Coptic cathedral known as Haile Selassie Church. Two thousand were to attend. Naturally I was bringing over my family. The plans were coming along beautifully until I was told, a mere ten days before our wedding day, that it couldn’t happen.

  “You’ll have to convert to Ethiopian Orthodoxy.”

  The speaker was the highest official of the church who, ironically, had a Ph.D. in theology from Princeton. He was a learned man whom we thought would marry us.

  I had some background on his religion. I understood how Easter
n Orthodoxy broke down along regional lines. You’ve got Greek Orthodoxy, Egyptian Orthodoxy, Armenian Orthodoxy, and, along with many others, that deep, deep Russian Orthodoxy. Among these divisions, though, Ethiopian Orthodoxy is the most ancient. It goes back to the caves. It isn’t about theological texts— it’s about how the priest filters the spirit. The holy men live exemplary lives. In other words, they don’t give answers in books. They show you how to live by the way they live, by their fleshified response to suffering.

  I have great respect for the tradition, but I had to tell the man, “No way I’m converting from my tradition. I love my tradition. I am my tradition.”

  “Then you’ll have to cancel the wedding.”

  “Can’t cancel now,” I said. “Plane tickets have been bought. I got my family flying in from California. Then there’s all the work that’s been done by my wife’s brother, Sirak, one of the loveliest men to ever walk the earth. He’s been organizing wedding plans, along with the rest of his family and prominent citizens in Addis Ababa, for months. Ain’t no stopping us now, my good brother.”

  “I will not permit a marriage in our sacred cathedral when one of the parties is not of our faith.”

  “We’re going to have to talk this out,” I said. “No way in the world I’m going to disappoint Elleni’s dear mother, Harigewain Mola. After all, she’s a relative of Menilik II, the founder of your nation.” And my dear Brother Sirak, Elleni’s brother, had already paid for all the wedding events.