The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  My tenure at Duke was regrettably brief. Still, it gave me time to get to know John Hope better, to listen to his stories about school and segregation, about the academic life before Brown v. Board and his role in and perceptions of the Civil Rights Movement. Best of all, I loved his anecdotes. His favorite story was about the day he met W. E. B. Du Bois. Franklin was a graduate student at Harvard, doing research in North Carolina for his thesis on the Free Negro in North Carolina before the Civil War. John Hope, taking his evening meal in the segregated Arcade Hotel in the spring of 1939 spotted the great Du Bois dining alone in a corner. Cautiously, tentatively, he approached his hero. Du Bois’ gaze was riveted on a book. John Hope loved describing what happened next:

  Seeing Dr. Du Bois dining alone and reading, I decided that this was an opportunity that I would not let pass. Crossing the dining room, I approached his table and spoke to him, giving him my full name. Surely he would recognize the fact that I was named for one of his closest friends and hearing it would embrace me. He did not even look up. Then I told him that I was a graduate of Fisk University, class of 1935. That, I assumed, would bring him to his feet singing ‘Gold and Blue.’ Again, he continued to read and eat, without looking up. Finally, as a last resort, I told him that I was a graduate student in history at Harvard and was in Raleigh doing research for my dissertation. Without looking up from his book or plate, he said, ‘How do you do.’ Dejected, I retreated, completed my dinner, and withdrew from the dining room (Franklin 2005, p. 117).

  John Hope loved to tell that story, always ending it with, “Of course we became close friends later, when he and his wife, Shirley, lived in Brooklyn and I was teaching at the College.” He told the story as a way of explaining why he was so very generous with younger colleagues. Myself included.

  In April of 2007, Butler University invited us both to campus for a dialogue. I agreed, but only if I could play the role of interviewer, and if we could talk with no strict time limit attached. John Hope regaled a standing-room-only crowd for over two hours with stories about his family, his education, his political beliefs, his triumphs and disappointments. And as we dined together, sharing a bottle of Margaux, followed by a cognac, he congratulated me on recruiting Bill Wilson and Cornel West to Harvard despite his best efforts to dissuade them from coming. I congratulated him on receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom; he returned the compliment about my receipt of the National Medal of the Humanities.

  I congratulated him on Duke University’s creation of the John Hope Franklin Research Center, and the forthcoming edition of From Slavery to Freedom, being revised by my colleague Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, the first Black professor ever to receive tenure in Harvard’s history department. I told him how much I valued the old third edition, the one with the black and white cover, and that I deeply regretted that it had gotten misplaced somehow. He told me he was proud of what we had created at Harvard. I shared with him the faculty’s decision to co-name the library at the Du Bois Institute in his honor. He promised to visit, which he did following his speech at Drew Faust’s inauguration. He seemed touched by the gesture.

  A few days later, a FedEx envelope arrived at my house in Cambridge. Inside was another package, carefully wrapped in brown paper, the way antiquarians in England wrap books that they mail. When I give books as Christmas presents, I wrap them the same way. There is something wonderful about that brown wrapping paper. Inside the paper was a signed copy of From Slavery to Freedom, the black and white paperback edition, dated 1967, the same one that Professor McFeely had assigned us back at Yale. It was signed, “With affectionate best wishes.” It sits in the bookshelf by my bedside.

  REFERENCES

  Franklin, John Hope (1947). From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans New York: A.A. Knopf. Reprint, 3ed. (1967). New York: Knopf.

  Franklin, John Hope (2005). Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  SOURCE: Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 7, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 5–8. Copyright © 2010 W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press.

  KING OF CATS

  Albert Murray

  IN THE LATE seventies, I used to take the train from New Haven to New York on Saturdays, to spend afternoons with Albert Murray at Books & Company, on Madison Avenue. We would roam—often joined by the artist Romare Bearden—through fiction, criticism, philosophy, music. Murray always seemed to wind up fingering densely printed paperbacks by Joyce, Mann, Proust, or Faulkner; Bearden, typically, would pick up a copy of something daunting like Rilke’s “Letters on Cézanne” and then insist that I read it on the train home that night.

  In those days, Murray was writing Count Basie’s autobiography—a project that he didn’t finish until 1985. (“For years,” he has remarked more than once, “when I wrote the word ‘I,’ it meant Basie.”) But he had already published most of the books that would secure his reputation as a cultural critic—perhaps most notably, his début collection, “The Omni-Americans” (1970), which brought together his ferocious attacks on black separatism, on protest literature, and on what he called “the social science-fiction monster.” Commanding as he could be on the page, Murray was an equally impressive figure in the flesh: a lithe and dapper man with an astonishing gift of verbal fluency, by turns grandiloquent and earthy. I loved to listen to his voice—grave but insinuating, with more than a hint of a jazz singer’s rasp. Murray had been a schoolmate of the novelist Ralph Ellison at the Tuskegee Institute, and the friendship of the two men over the years seemed a focal point of black literary culture in the ensuing decades. Ellison’s one novel, “Invisible Man,” was among the few unequivocal masterpieces of American literature in the postwar era, satirizing with equal aplomb Garveyites, Communists, and white racists in both their Southern-agrarian and their Northern-liberal guises. Murray’s works of critique and cultural exploration seemed wholly in the same spirit. Both men were militant integrationists, and they shared an almost messianic view of the importance of art. In their ardent belief that Negro culture was a constitutive part of American culture, they had defied an entrenched literary mainstream, which preferred to regard black culture as so much exotica—amusing, perhaps, but eminently dispensable. Now they were also defying a new black vanguard, which regarded authentic black culture as separate from the rest of American culture—something that was created, and could be appreciated, in splendid isolation. While many of their peers liked to speak of wrath and resistance, Murray and Ellison liked to speak of complexity and craft, and for that reason they championed the art of Romare Bearden.

  In terms of both critical regard and artistic fecundity, these were good days for Bearden, a large, light-skinned man with a basketball roundness to his head. (I could never get over how much he looked like Nikita Khrushchev.) He, like Murray, was working at the height of his powers—he was completing his famous “Jazz” series of collages—and his stature and influence were greater than those which any other African-American artist had so far enjoyed. The collages combined the visual conventions of black American folk culture with the techniques of modernism—fulfilling what Murray called “the vernacular imperative” to transmute tradition into art.

  After a couple of hours at the bookstore, we’d go next door to the Madison Cafe, where Romie, as Murray called him, always ordered the same item: the largest fruit salad that I had ever seen in public. He claimed that he chose the fruit salad because he was watching his weight, but I was convinced that he chose it in order to devour the colors, like an artist dipping his brush into his palette. He’d start laying the ground with the off-white of the apples and the bananas, and follow them with the pinkish orange of the grapefruit, the red of strawberries, the speckled green of kiwifruit; the blueberries and purple grapes he’d save for last. While Romie was consuming his colors, Murray would talk almost non-stop, his marvelous ternary sentences punctuated only by
the occasional bite of a B.L.T. or a tuna fish on rye. Murray was then, as now, a man with definite preoccupations, and among the touchstones of his conversation were terms like “discipline,” “craft,” “tradition,” “the aesthetic,” and “the Negro idiom.” And names like Thomas Mann, André Malraux, Kenneth Burke, and Lord Raglan. There was also another name—a name that never weighed more heavily than when it was unspoken—which sometimes took longer to come up.

  “Heard from Ralph lately?” Bearden would almost whisper as the waitress brought the check.

  “Still grieving, I guess,” Murray would rasp back, shaking his head slowly. He was referring to the fire, about a decade earlier, that had destroyed Ellison’s Massachusetts farmhouse and, with it, many months of revisions on his long-awaited second novel. “That fire was a terrible thing.” Then Murray, who was so rarely at a loss for words, would fall silent.

  Later, when Bearden and I were alone in his Canal Street loft, he’d return to the subject in hushed tones: “Ralph is mad at Al. No one seems to know why. And it’s killed Al. He’s not sure what he did.”

  The rift, or whatever it amounted to, used to vex and puzzle me. It was a great mistake to regard Murray simply as Ellison’s sidekick, the way many people did, but he was without question the most fervent and articulate champion of Ellison’s art. The two were, in a sense, part of a single project: few figures on the scene shared as many presuppositions and preoccupations as they did. Theirs was a sect far too small for schismatics. At the very least, the rift made things awkward for would-be postulants like me.

  When “The Omni-Americans” came out, in 1970, I was in college, majoring in history but pursuing extracurricular studies in how to be black. Those were days when the Black Power movement smoldered, when militancy was the mode and rage de rigueur. Just two years before, the poets Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka had edited “Black Fire,” the book that launched the so-called Black Arts movement—in effect, the cultural wing of the Black Power movement. Maybe it was hard to hold a pen with a clenched fist, but you did what you could: the revolution wasn’t about niceties of style anyway. On the occasions when Ralph Ellison, an avatar of elegance, was invited to college campuses, blacks invariably denounced him for his failure to involve himself in the civil-rights struggle, for his evident disdain of the posturings of Black Power. For me, though, the era was epitomized by a reading that the poet Nikki Giovanni gave in a university lecture hall, to a standing-room-only crowd—a sea of colorful dashikis and planetary Afros. Her words seemed incandescent with racial rage, and each poem was greeted with a Black Power salute. “Right on! Right on!” we shouted, in the deepest voices we could manage, each time Giovanni made another grand claim about the blackness of blackness. Those were days when violence (or, anyway, talk of violence) had acquired a Fanonist glamour; when the black bourgeoisie—kulaks of color, nothing more—was reviled as an obstacle on the road to revolution; when the arts were seen as merely an instrumentality for a larger cause.

  Such was the milieu in which Murray published “The Omni-Americans,” and you couldn’t imagine a more foolhardy act. This was a book in which the very language of the black nationalists was subjected to a strip search. Ever since Malcolm X, for instance, the epithet “house Negro” had been a staple of militant invective; yet here was Murray arguing that if only we got our history straight we’d realize that those house Negros were practically race patriots. (“The house slave seems to have brought infinitely more tactical information from the big house to the cabins than any information about subversive plans he ever took back.”) And while radicals mocked their bourgeois brethren as “black Anglo-Saxons,” Murray defiantly declared, “Not only is it the so-called middle class Negro who challenges the status quo in schools, housing, voting practices, and so on, he is also the one who is most likely to challenge total social structures and value systems.” Celebrated chroniclers of black America, including Claude Brown, Gordon Parks, and James Baldwin, were shown by Murray to be tainted by the ethnographic fallacy, the pretense that one writer’s peculiar experiences can represent a social genus. “This whole thing about somebody revealing what it is really like to be black has long since gotten out of hand anyway,” he wrote. “Does anybody actually believe that, say, Mary McCarthy reveals what it is really like to be a U.S. white woman, or even a Vassar girl?” But he reserved his heaviest artillery for the whole social-science approach to black life, whether in the hands of the psychologist Kenneth Clark (of Brown v. Board of Education fame) or in those of the novelist Richard Wright, who had spent too much time reading his sociologist friends. What was needed wasn’t more sociological inquiry, Murray declared; what was needed was cultural creativity, nourished by the folkways and traditions of black America but transcending them. And the work of literature that best met that challenge, he said, was Ellison’s “Invisible Man.”

  The contrarian held his own simply by matching outrage with outrage—by writing a book that was so pissed-off, jaw-jutting, and unapologetic that it demanded to be taken seriously. Nobody had to tell this veteran about black fire: in Murray the bullies of blackness had met their most formidable opponent. And a great many blacks—who, suborned by “solidarity,” had trained themselves to suppress any heretical thoughts—found Murray’s book oddly thrilling: it had the transgressive frisson of samizdat under Stalinism. You’d read it greedily, though you just might want to switch dust jackets with “The Wretched of the Earth” before wandering around with it in public. “Very early on, he was saying stuff that could get him killed,” the African-American novelist David Bradley says. “And he did not seem to care.” The power of his example lingers. “One February, I had just delivered the usual black-history line, and I was beginning to feel that I was selling snake oil,” Bradley recalls. “And right here was this man who has said this stuff. And I’m thinking, Well, he ain’t dead yet.”

  As if to remove any doubts, Murray has just published two books simultaneously, both with Pantheon. One, “The Seven League Boots,” is his third novel, and completes a trilogy about a bright young fellow named Scooter, his fictional alter ego; the other, “The Blue Devils of Nada,” is a collection of critical essays, analyzing some favorite artists (Ellington, Hemingway, Bearden) and expatiating upon some favorite tenets (the “blues idiom” as an aesthetic substrate, the essentially fluid nature of American culture). Both are books that will be discussed and debated for years to come; both are vintage Murray.

  The most outrageous theorist of American culture lives, as he has lived for three decades, in a modest apartment in Lenox Terrace, in Harlem. When I visit him there, everything is pretty much as I remembered it. The public rooms look like yet another Harlem branch of the New York Public Library. Legal pads and magnifying glasses perch beside his two or three favorite chairs, along with numerous ball-point pens, his weapons of choice. His shelves record a lifetime of enthusiasms; James, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Proust, and Faulkner are among the authors most heavily represented. Close at hand are volumes by favored explicants, such as Joseph Campbell, Kenneth Burke, Carl Jung, Rudolph Arnheim, Bruno Bettelheim, Constance Rourke. On his writing desk sits a more intimate canon. There’s Thomas Mann’s four-volume “Joseph and His Brothers”—the saga, after all, of a slave who gains the power to decide the fate of a people. There’s André Malraux’s “Man’s Fate,” which represented for Ellison and Murray a more rarefied mode of engagé writing than anything their compeers had to offer. There’s Joel Chandler Harris’s “The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus,” a mother lode of African-American folklore. One wall is filled with his famously compendious collection of jazz recordings; a matte-black CD-player was a gift from his protégé Wynton Marsalis. You will not, however, see the sort of framed awards that festooned Ellison’s apartment. “I have received few of those honors,” he says, pulling on his arthritic right leg. “No American Academy, few honorary degrees.”

  A quarter of a century has passed since Murray’s literary début, and time has mellowed him not at
all. His arthritis may have worsened over the past few years, and there is always an aluminum walker close by, but as he talks he sprouts wings. Murray likes to elaborate on his points and elaborate on his elaborations, until you find that you have circumnavigated the globe and raced through the whole of post-Homeric literary history—and this is what he calls “vamping till ready.” In his conversation, outrages alternate with insights, and often the insights are the outrages. Every literary culture has its superego and its id; Albert Murray has the odd distinction of being both. The contradictions of human nature are, fittingly, a favorite topic of Murray’s. He talks about how Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder but how he also helped to establish a country whose founding creed was liberty. “Every time I think about it,” he says, “I want to wake him up and give him ten more slaves.” He’s less indulgent of the conflicting impulses of Malcolm X. Dr. King’s strategy of nonviolence was “one of the most magnificent things that anybody ever invented in the civil-rights movement,” he maintains. “And this guy came up and started thumbing his nose at it, and, to my utter amazement, he’s treated as if he were a civil-rights leader. He didn’t lead anything. He was in Selma laughing at these guys. God damn, nigger!”