The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  The inverse is true. Blacks love white music and the instruments that Europeans made. I play the flute. Africans had bamboo flutes but the silver flute is something else. It’s amazing what you can do with it. It’s amazing what Bach did in codifying this twelve-tone system and harmony. It’s equally amazing that there’s a counterpoint in the rhythms that come out of Africa that you can find nowhere in Europe. When the two meet, it’s very exciting.

  It’s no accident that I got into jazz. It’s where black meets white. And that’s what happened to me. I’m a child of black meeting white and it’s a perfect home for me.

  Now, the other side of the coin. Yesterday was the anniversary of Fred Hampton’s murder. 80When I was a kid, I hung out with somebody who was shot in that raid. Four times in the belly. I was scared. I was eleven or twelve.

  Then I was into rock-and-roll. I was heavily into Jimi Hendrix. A lot of people I knew seemed to be dying of overdosing. I was experimenting with drugs myself. I would break into my mother’s infirmary and steal drugs. Experimenting. Because that’s what we did in the sixties. I thought I was going to die of that. There was a lot of fear. I began to retreat.

  For a while, I wanted to be really political. I came from a politically charged past. My white grandfather spent time in a Czarist prison for teaching peasants how to read. I was born into it. I thought I’d continue this strain, so I studied economics. I figured it boils down to money. The Golden Rule: He who’s got the gold makes the rule.

  In the white suburb, you’d get chased around by the greasers. They’d throw rocks and call you nigger. To me, it was fun in a way. You could run away from them and thought you were part of the struggle. It was different in high school. I got pretty much caught up with an artsy crowd and with hippies.

  I went to Marlboro College in Vermont. There was a lot of pressure from my father to get into the hard sciences. He comes out of the Depression and he feels you’ll not survive unless you have the hard stuff. Up there, I realized what I really wanted to do, so I switched to music.

  It was a period of disillusionment for me. I think I inherited from my mother this vision of the world as a Utopia, where everybody got along and the poor were fed. I was escaping from my parents and a legacy. It was also a denial that I was black.

  I was at an all-white school. I was hanging with all white people. I was getting into a more European culture. I was attending to classical music. Bach, Beethoven, and Stravinsky were my new heroes. At the same time, I was still very much into jazz. I did a fifty-page paper on John Coltrane. It was the beginning of an awakening.

  I was playing tenor sax in an R&B band. It’s a salt-and-pepper group, black and white. This is 1981. We were playing a gig at a blues club in Joliet. We’re well paid. There’s a big urban-blues renaissance that didn’t happen in the sixties. That whole blues thing is like jumping through the hoops for Whitey.

  We played two tunes and the owner pays us off for all three nights. He says, “Please leave my club.” The Ku Klux Klan was putting heat on him. We’d noticed KKK graffiti on the dressing-room wall. The good ol’ boys didn’t like the idea of a salt-and-pepper group and threatened to wreck the place. If we were all-black, it would have been okay. I remember racial problems as a little kid in Oak Park, but this was the first time since I’d been a teen-ager. Remember, I’d gotten away. Race wasn’t an issue with me, I thought.

  These blues clubs depress the hell out of me. It’s packed with young white people, mostly from the suburbs. I call them Cub fans. It’s more like slumming. Remember the white guy on the plantation calling to the black? “Sing something for us.” They were entertainers like these guys hadn’t seen before. They were cutting loose in a way the more repressed European culture couldn’t. Today these Cub fans feel this old black blues singer is preaching some sort of wisdom they didn’t know about. There’s a void in their lives, and they think he’s gonna fill it. That’s debatable. It’s also a time when they can jump up, get drunk, and act crazy. It’s a big party-time for them.

  At a South Side blues club, you might see twelve, fifteen middle-aged black guys. They got off work, come here for a beer and the blues. It’s not a place for them to act up. For them, it’s more like sustenance. “This is what I need to cool off after a hard day’s work.” The singer doesn’t talk between songs. He just goes from one blues to another. It’s like you’re in their living room.

  At this time, I was personally lost, insecure about my skills as a musician, deeply in debt. I got a job teaching college down in Tennessee in ’86.

  Teaching at a white college boosted my ego. When I found out I was an affirmative action case, I was devastated. I wasn’t their first choice. In fact, I wonder if they’d have interviewed me if I weren’t black. I was not the hot spit I thought I was. I understand the historical reasons for it, but I found it tough to take.

  I was there to save the school from a lawsuit. I found out that my best friend on the faculty wanted his other friend to get the job. He was a great classical-flute player, much better than I was. They interviewed him, a white male, a white female and myself. I found out they hated the woman but liked Jim and me. They thought he was better, but the administration said they had to hire me. “If he’s your second choice, he’s it.” My friend now thinks that I turned out to be a better teacher than Jim probably would have been. He wasn’t upset at all. I was upset.

  I feel like I infiltrate the white world. I bring some African roots with me. I get co-opted on the way. My mother is white, the first bit of being co-opted. I go to this white school and get a white degree. I get co-opted by the system. At the same time, I change the rules. The more black people you get in there, the more the rules change.

  I started getting grants and being hired without affirmative action. When you’re black, you cannot help but second-guess everything. Does this person like me because I’m black or because I’m me? Does this person hate me because I’m black or because I’m a jerk? You’re always second-guessing, unless it’s another black person. Why do you think black people only hang out with other black people? They don’t know what’s going on half the time. You’re working at an incredible disadvantage.

  I live on the North Side now and hang out mostly with white musicians. I see a lot of love between the races here because they’re nuts about music and it cuts across racial lines. My wife manages my business. She gets the jobs at parties and hotels. She also manages an office downtown. She got her MBA from Kellogg. 81

  When I started going with her, she got some flak from her family, not much. They’re upper-crust suburban Connecticut. It was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Her mom worried for a while. She didn’t want to have brown grandchildren. She’s over that now. We plan to have kids.

  I can’t get too mad at white people. Half my family is white. But I don’t stand in judgment of people who get pissed off. Part of me says, “Yeah, go ahead, good.” My father’s not like that and he’s as black as black can be. He abhors ignorance. He sees ignorance as a cause of a lot of anger. You can’t deny the anger people feel and it’s got to run its course. Black people have got to get upset. I think they’re going to get more upset.

  But it’s going to get ugly sometimes and there are going to be people like Louis Farrakhan and they have to be there. It’s a purging process, like going to a psychiatrist.

  It wasn’t until three, four years ago, I had the nerve to talk to anybody in a urinal of a white movie theater. Something about it just brought back bad feelings. Though I’m half-white, I know that there’s a myth going around about the black man and sexuality.

  One of the things a lot of white women have told me is when they look at musicians on stage, they look at the way they move. A lot of black people move pretty loosely. Sometimes they have fantasies about how this person is in bed. It drives the white males nuts.

  There are similarities between the black poor and “white trash.” A kid like Elvis Presley grew up and had a rhythmic freedom that lot of white upper-
crust kids just didn’t have. They went nuts for it. “White trash” listened to Grand Old Opry on the radio. Black people tuned into that. Then white people started listening to race records being played on the air. They had similar tastes. They were loose.

  Cops hassle me, but I’m too educated now. When I was young, I used to get a lot of grief from the cops. In this white suburb, when I was riding my bike, I’d get stopped by the cops. They thought I stole the bike. I was scared of cops. I don’t know one black person who has never had an encounter with cops.

  One day, I’m running to catch the El. This is the third time I got stopped by cops that year, okay? Once they searched my laundry because they thought I stuffed a stereo in there. This time I’m running for an appointment with my barber. I realize I don’t have any money. So I stop by my bank on the way. I take out sixty dollars. I take a short-cut through the alley, counting my money. A cop car pulls up. They slam me against the wall, throw me in the car, no Miranda rights or anything.

  I had a book under my arm. I think it was Salinger. I’m well-dressed. He said, “You stole this woman’s purse.” I said I didn’t steal any purse. They take me to this lady’s apartment building a few blocks away. They parade me in front of her window. She’s three stories up. I look up. “Don’t look at her!” I try to explain. “Shut up, you got no rights, kid.” They really let me have it the whole time. I happened to look up a second and saw an old woman in her seventies with glasses. The window was dirty. I’m this black kid, three stories down, and she’s going to identify me. I can’t believe this. They had me walking back and forth. Fortunately, I was wearing glasses, too. She said it wasn’t me because the guy that robbed her wasn’t wearing glasses. They gave me my book back and said, “Get out of here.”

  Did they apologize?

  [Laughs incredulously.] What?

  It was ’83 or ’84. I was sitting there very polite. This is the way I behave around policemen. I didn’t want to be late for my haircut. I was yessirring and no-sirring my ass off. When he gave me back my book, I said, “Thank you. I understand you’re just doing your job.” And I was gone.

  If that happened to me today, I would give them hell. I feel big and bad. I wish they would pick me up now, because I’ve got a big mouth on me now.

  I look at older people now and I love them. My father is beautiful, though he gets stuck in a few gears now and then. He says things that I think are crazy, and a few years later I find out that it wasn’t so crazy. That old guy knew what he was talking about. I always make the analogy between a person and the world at large. If somehow, somewhere, the world could get objectivity. If there were some big universal mirror...

  I have faith we can mature. Stranger things have happened. Maybe America, maybe the world is in its adolescence. Maybe we’re driving home from the prom, drunk, and nobody knows whether we’re going to survive or not. Maybe we’ll survive and maybe we’ll be a pretty smart old person, well-adjusted and mellow.

  I am guardedly optimistic—definitely guardedly. If everything is going to hell, it would be hard for me to get up in the morning. But I can’t honestly say, “Sure, things will get better.” We might not make it home from the prom.

  Coming of Age:

  The Story of Our Century By Those Who Have Lived It (1995)

  INTRODUCTION

  I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle for me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

  Was George Bernard Shaw touching ninety when he wrote that? Or eighty? Or seventy? The odds are his red whiskers had already turned white. I know this was so with the seventy-five-year-old storekeeper whose domain had become the center of the ghost town, somewhere in the hills and hollers of eastern Kentucky. “There’s no way a man can slow down. I owe it to the people of this community. There’s no end to the battle. The last flicker of my life will be against something that I don’t think has to be.”

  Astonishingly, though the town is still up against it, among the many wretched enclaves of the strip-mined region, it refuses to die. The ghost has assumed flesh and is once again alive and kicking. Thanks in no small way to this man’s obdurate nature. He had never met Shaw, nor, I’m fairly certain, had he ever read any of his stuff, yet the two subscribe to the same tenet.

  I have chosen him, along with sixty-nine other graying contemporaries of like nature as the protagonists of this work. A few will be found here of another bent, perhaps, who nonetheless share his life span and hang on as obstinately as he.

  The choice—seventy as the minimum age for admission to this circle—is not an arbitrary one. In our century, the scriptural three score and ten as the allotted earthly portion has been considerably extended, thanks to advances in medicine and—mixed blessing—technology. There is a note of exquisite irony here.

  It is not technology per se that the grayheads in these pages challenge, though there are a couple of Luddites in the crowd. It is the purpose toward which it has so often been put. Among the grievances aired: the promiscuous use of the machine; the loss of the personal touch; the vanishing skills of the hand; the competitive edge rather than the cooperative center; the corporate credo as all-encompassing truth; the sound bite as instant wisdom; trivia as substance; and the denigration of language. Wright Morris, some thirty years ago, pinpointed the dilemma: “We’re in the world of communications more and more, though we’re in communication less and less.”

  I talk into the telephone these days as hopefully, though uncertainly, as my brother once talked to horses. He was a small-time follower of the races, who, at the corner bookie shop, listening to the wire, desperately urged on his long shots. Of course, they also ran. It was a precious moment, Lord, when one of them delivered. (0 rare Morvich! ) 82

  So it is with me and the telephone: Will I reach my party? In the dear, dead days almost beyond recall, a human voice responded. Today, in metallic speech, seemingly human, you are offered a choice of numbers from one to, say, six. If you are lucky, or if God is with you, you might connect—that is, if you remember who it was you called.

  The Atlanta airport is as modern as they come. As you leave the gate, there are trains that transport you to the concourse of your choice. As you enter one, the voice you hear, unlike the old-time train caller’s, is robotic. It, rather than he or she, offers destinations. The blessed moment for me, as I and fellow passengers entered in dead silence, was when a late-arriving couple desperately parted the pneumatic doors and made it inside. The voice, without missing a beat, intoned: “Because of late entry, there is a thirty-second delay.” So much for the tardy miscreants. All eyes turned toward the guilty two. They quailed. Having had a couple of drinks, I called out, “George Orwell, your time has come and gone.” Silence. I quailed. As any fool can plainly see, we have made remarkable technological advances.

  There was a moment of saving grace in the presence of a baby, seated in the lap of its Hispanic mother. Having overcome my momentary guilt, I addressed the infant: “What is your considered opinion of all this?” The child broke into a wide FDR grin. “There is still hope,” I cried triumphantly, despite the ensuing silence. Then came sobriety and a cold morning.

  Chalk this up as the crotchet of an octogenarian, singularly suspicious of machines of any sort. It may have been one of my kindred spirits at the turn of the century, who, spotting a stranded motorist, shouted gleefully, “Get yourself a horse!”

  It may have been an old man’s arrogance in interpreting a baby’s smile. The baby, much as Buckminster Fuller’s grandchild, may have been attuned to the sound of the 727 long before it heard the song of the lark. The one song, the machine’s, has become natural; the other, the bird’s, has become exotic. Perhaps th
at’s why old environmentalists sound so querulous.

  Yet it was a ninety-year-old composer, who, at a concert of Stockhausen’s electronic works, shouted “Bravo!” He had, sixty years before, in Vienna, cheered the revolutionary music of Webern, as others threw eggs. As I remained seated, bewildered by what sounded like static, he called out, “You’ll see, my friend, one day you’ll see.” A young couple, seated nearby, holding hands, murmured, “They’re playing our song.” At least, I so imagined.

  It evoked the memory of another concert, at a London watering hole, attended by serious, hardly audible young people. A tape of John Cage’s sounds and silences filled the room, wall-to-wall with listeners enraptured. Standing. My calves were killing me. Bad circulation.

  Life certainly does not begin at seventy, God knows, what with the ineluctable infirmities ruefully cited by our heroes. “I’m on my third pacemaker,” says the eighty-year-old invalid, “and it’s often out of rhythm and I use only half my heart. It takes down my spirits considerably.” Yet her spirits soar, as she, in her sick bed, recalls her twenty-three-year-old self as the firebrand of the 1937 Flint sitdown strike. She is atop that sound truck once more. “I can’t become cynical. I still hope we’ll see a decent society, for cryin’ out loud.” A deep sigh. “I better take that pill now.”

  The Mexican-American doyen of his community, is philosophical as he responds to his buddy, who grieves on seeing him hobble with his cane. “It beats not walking at all.” The widow of our century’s preeminent cultural critic laments her husband’s last years. “He was living half the way, obstreperous, incontinent, who had lived with such dignity.” She bangs her fist on her walker. “This glorification of old age is a great mistake.” Yet none of them will accept the status of Beckett’s gaffers and crones. No trash can finale for these embattled ones. Their sphere is still Out There.