Julie had come with me, as she almost always did, and we were staying in one of the protocol houses, but went for lunch one day at the National Hotel. At a nearby table, I noticed a group of blacks who seemed to be Cuban. I wound up talking to them, and they told me they were rappers. I said I hadn’t known that Cuba had rappers. After all, rap is in your face, by definition. How could they be true to rap’s spirit in Castro’s Cuba? They couldn’t perform in Havana’s clubs, they acknowledged; to the country’s elite, they didn’t even exist. But they did perform underground, often for hundreds of people. That night, Julie and I went to hear the ones we’d met. We were amazed. Of course we didn’t understand every word and idiom; rap is hard enough to follow in English, much less in a second language. But a translator helped us follow the gist, and I fully appreciated the passion behind what I was hearing.
The very next day, Julie and I had lunch with Fidel, along with his minister of culture, Abel Prieto, a tall, very handsome, very Spanish-looking hippie with long hair and blue eyes. We started talking about blacks in Cuban culture, which gave me an opportunity to bring up the black rappers we’d heard the night before, and what a pity it was that they could only perform underground. I could see that Castro had only the vaguest idea of what rap and hip-hop were, so I gave him a crash course in how they’d swept the planet, how they not only dominated the international music industry but had so much to say about the social and political issues of the day. For Castro to be unaware of how much Cuban rappers were adding to that conversation was truly a pity—not least because I could see how a U.S.-Cuban cultural exchange in rap and hip-hop might start a dialogue between the two countries. Fidel turned in some bafflement to the minister of culture. “Why are these artists afraid to perform in Havana?”
Prieto had to admit he didn’t know much about rap or Cuban rappers, let alone black ones. To Fidel, free speech wasn’t so much the issue as racism; if black artists in Cuba were being repressed, that undermined Castro’s no-prejudice policy. Lunch was over, so we stood up to take our leave. “Where are you going?” Fidel demanded. I suggested we might head back to our protocol house. “No, no, no. I want you to come with me and tell me more about these rappers.”
Whether we liked it or not, we were now part of Fidel’s entourage for the day. Out we went to his unmarked presidential car. Fidel slid into the passenger seat, while we got in back. “So,” he said, turning back to us, “what is this hip-hop?”
First stop was a graduation ceremony for some four thousand medical students. Despite all the hardships, Cuba had kept up a highly regarded medical system for its citizens, and managed at the same time to send out thousands of newly certified doctors each year to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, reaping an enormous amount of goodwill throughout the developing world. Fidel pulled me onstage to say a few words to the sea of graduates, then launched into one of the marathon speeches for which he was so well known. Finally it was back into the car and off to the next event.
Fidel kept me close, peppering me with more questions on rap. Our final stop was a buffet dinner for Alicia Alonso, Cuba’s top ballerina, who had studied with Balanchine, become a great star in the United States, then decided to go back to Cuba and devote her life to building a national ballet company. I was thrilled to meet her, though it wasn’t long before I felt a familiar hand on my arm. “And what about white rappers? Are there many?”
“Yes,” I said, “but I think what is most interesting about all this is that the largest audience in America for this music is white children. It is an amazing phenomenon.”
Fidel considered that thought for a moment and simply said, “Hmm.”
When I got back to the protocol house, I looked at my watch: I’d just spent eleven hours with Fidel.
Almost a year later, on my next trip to Cuba, a young woman and two young men approached me and gave me some flowers. I said thank you, but what are these for? The young man said, “For everything you said to Fidel Castro about rap.” All three were rappers. Since my last visit, their lives had changed dramatically. Fidel had not only declared his approval of Cuban rappers, he’d dedicated a brownstone in Havana to the nascent Cuban rap movement, and outfitted it with a recording studio, as well as all the equipment of a fully functioning office and communications center. Today those rappers are heard all over Latin America and have carved out a very respectable place in the U.S. rap scene. Some have even decided to live here.
My last visit to Cuba—in the fall of 2009—was, of them all, the most poignant. I was down with a film crew, gathering footage for a documentary about my life in the human rights movement. I asked Fidel for an interview, and for the first time, he invited me to his home. He may have other homes around the island for all I know; this one was a modest house with a swimming pool in the hills outside Havana.
Fidel had had a bad fall in 2004 while stepping down from a stage, breaking a kneecap and fracturing an arm. Two years later, intestinal surgery had left him so frail and despondent that he handed power over to his brother and, as he later put it in an interview, prepared to die. But Fidel is a tough old bird; somehow he’d regained the will to live, and embarked on a program of rehabilitation. The Fidel we saw that day was almost fully recovered—his cane discarded, his handshake firm, his eyes once again flashing with curiosity and passion, though also with some exasperation. “As a musician, you should know rhythm and timing,” he grumbled as he greeted me. “Your timing is awful!”
I asked him what he meant by that.
“The playoffs!”
Castro is a rabid baseball fan. He did all he could to encourage promising Cuban players, only to have the best of them defect to the United States to play in the Major Leagues. “In order to see some of Cuba’s best players play, I have to watch American baseball,” he said. He indicated the TV behind him, and the game in progress.
The revolution hadn’t fulfilled its promise, and now was facing its most critical challenge. While he never quite came out and said as much, Fidel clearly knew it. And yet his fascination with world politics was undiminished; he was up on every issue, and despite Cuba’s problems, despite the global recession, he was filled with excitement for what might yet be.
Fidel was so charismatic, his energy so powerful, his legacy in some ways so admirable, in other ways so sad. I genuinely liked him, but I can’t say he was my role model. Paul Robeson was my role model. Sadly, by the time I met Fidel, Paul had slipped into his final decline.
I had done my best, ever since our simultaneous concerts in London in 1958, to stay in touch with Paul. It wasn’t easy. During a tour of the Soviet Union in 1961, he’d slit his wrists in a Moscow hotel room and nearly died. Admitted for some months to a Soviet sanatorium, he had experienced bouts of paranoia, and come to feel he’d been given hallucinogenic drugs, possibly by the CIA. Back in London’s Priory Hospital, he had undergone more than fifty rounds of electroshock therapy, later viewed as grossly excessive. Paul and his son, Paul junior, felt that both the British and U.S. intelligence services were manipulating his treatment to “neutralize” him. Certainly they were monitoring Paul’s condition, though perhaps in an effort to keep him alive, not have him die; an FBI memo at the time warned that Paul’s death would be used for communist propaganda. Whatever the causes of his physical ill health, I saw enough of Paul to know that he was also suffering deep and enduring depression about what had happened to so many of his friends in the Soviet Union. He had believed strongly in the Soviet promise, and would say nothing publicly against it that would give ammunition to the anti-communist zealots who’d hounded him for so long. But he knew what a genocidal psychopath Stalin had become, and that tormented him.
Paul had moved back to the United States in 1963, living first with his wife, Eslanda, in Harlem, and then, after Eslanda’s death, moving into a humble brownstone apartment with his sister in Philadelphia. When I visited him there, we sat on straight-backed chairs in the dining room, in an apartment that held no traces of his life and
achievements: no framed photographs, posters, or other memorabilia. This was, after all, his sister’s house, but those unadorned walls heightened the sense of a man cut off from his own legacy. Physically, he was reduced from that towering, broad-shouldered force of nature to a stooped and frail figure. Still, he seemed in good spirits, largely, I suspect, because I’d come to discuss the plans for a seventy-fifth-birthday tribute to him at Carnegie Hall.
The idea had come up in conversation with Paul Robeson, Jr., who lived near me on the Upper West Side. When Paul had mentioned in early 1973 that his father’s seventy-fifth birthday was coming up, he and I started making things happen. Paul senior planned to attend. But as April 9 loomed, he fell ill, and had to cancel the trip. The event went forward without him: Three thousand people filled Carnegie Hall for a night of music, homage, and love. Everyone from Sidney to Odetta, Dizzy Gillespie to Coretta, James Earl Jones, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee was there. Birthday greetings came from President Julius K. Nyerere of Tanzania, President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India, and more. Paul’s presence filled the hall, and a prerecorded greeting from him played on a giant screen. “Though I have not been able to be active for several years,” Paul told us in halting tones, “I want you to know that I am the same Paul, dedicated as ever to the worldwide cause of humanity for freedom, peace, and brotherhood.”
A little less than three years later, Paul died—whether from complications of a stroke, as the doctors said, or just a broken heart, who could say. By a strange coincidence, he died on the very day—January 23, 1976—that I was serving as best man to Sidney for his wedding to Joanna Shimkus at Sidney’s mansion in Beverly Hills. Four days later, I joined the throng of five thousand mourners at Mother AME Zion Church in Harlem. Among them were Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz, composer Eubie Blake, and Henry Winston, chairman of the American Communist party. Even in death, Paul was going to show the world he’d stuck to his beliefs. At one point, after many had spoken, we sat in silence, listening to a recording of Paul singing “Deep River” in his inimitable bass baritone. How vividly I remembered that voice, and that towering figure filling the tiny backstage corridor of the Village Vanguard. “Get them to sing your song, and they’ll want to know who you are.” Those words had stayed with me, and so had his song, of unwavering courage and character. In all I’d done, he’d guided and inspired me. My whole life was an homage to him.
The death of my brother, Dennis, at about the same time, was a different kind of loss: the sad, quiet demise of a man who’d never dared to dream at all. His whole life had been a ball of tension. He radiated anxiety and rage. His wife had left him when they were young. I doubt he’d ever taken up with anyone again. What Dennis lived for, more than anyone I’ve ever known, was the movies. He’d go to a first showing and stay in the darkened theater all day. “Your eyes are so red from all that movie-watching, you’re going to ruin your eyesight,” I’d say, to no effect. For Dennis, movies were an addiction.
I think the only job he ever had was the one I got him, at the United Artists warehouse in New York. Dennis was put in charge of UA’s vast trove of film: most of the original prints, and many secondary ones, for every movie UA ever made. Dennis loved that job. He stayed in that warehouse year after year, never sought a promotion and never received one. He had almost nothing to do in his working hours. That suited him fine. He spent his days writing script after dreadful script. The stories weren’t even his own. He would alter the plot of a movie with John Wayne and make me the star. It was mental illness. At the end of the day, he would often smuggle out a can of film. If there were fifteen cans of sixteen-millimeter, he’d take one. No one ever noticed anything missing, since Dennis was the one who kept the inventory, and no one encroached on his domain. Only after his death did I realize how much film he’d acquired. His bathtub, the sink, the kitchen cupboards were filled with cans of film. He never sold any of it; profiteering wasn’t his thing. He just wanted to own it all.
Dennis died in his mid-forties. He just keeled over during a solitary restaurant dinner in the Bronx. I had to go identify him. When I did, I just fell apart, overwhelmed with guilt. Dennis was the one who’d been palmed off to some other school in Jamaica while I attended the proper and prominent Morris-Knibb. I’d left him in my shadow, and never really looked back to be sure he was all right on his own. I’d failed him, or so I felt. Only later would I realize that in getting him that job at UA, I’d done perhaps the one thing I could have to give him joy.
When I called my mother to relay the news of his death, she began wailing. “Oh, God, don’t tell me so … Ah, Jesus, why me, why me …” I never knew her in any greater pain than at that moment. Nothing I could say consoled her. Like all mothers, she’d felt most protective of her unsuccessful child. She’d often said that the cruelest cut my father ever inflicted was to say he didn’t think Dennis was his son.
Sidney’s wedding to Joanna Shimkus was, in all but one respect, rather anticlimactic. He and Joanna had known each other so long that they had two young daughters who served as flower girls for the ceremony. But Julie, who served as matron of honor, got so moved by the exchanging of vows that she declared we had to renew our own. So we tagged along with Sidney and Joanna up to Vegas for their honeymoon, got the star treatment at Caesars, and scheduled our own second wedding at a Vegas wedding chapel. In the day or two before the service, Julie shared her excitement with the wife of one of Vegas’s big bosses. She went on so much about the depth and importance of the vows that the wife told her husband they had to renew their vows, too! That Vegas hotelier looked stricken at being dragged into the chapel, but apparently his wife was the one person he couldn’t order around. Sidney and Joanna stood as witnesses for the four of us, and vows were duly exchanged.
Deep down, I think, Julie knew as well as I did that a second wedding wouldn’t save our marriage. Somehow, at some point, love had left the room, but neither Julie nor I wanted to admit it. We were both caught up in a fierce dance of public image, dancing long after the music had stopped. We substituted politics for passion, and then confused the two. I traveled more than I had to, and that distance settled in between us, letting us lead more separate lives.
I’m sure all of my children sensed this, maybe more than we did. Certainly David and Gina, while they still lived at home, felt their father’s frequent absences. I wasn’t at the dinner table all that much. I didn’t take them to enough baseball games or nearly enough movies and plays. I did arrange to have all four of my children join me in Vegas for summer engagements that coincided with their school vacations. We had blocks of time there, but sharing room service in suites at Caesars was not, perhaps, quite the same as eating together at home. I felt guilty about that, so I indulged them—a lot. They had the best of everything, from private schools to fancy clothes, from Lake Tahoe ski trips to Caribbean beach retreats. We’d go to Africa, but instead of going on a safari, I’d drag them along to meet with African leaders and take them on drives into the interior to a village of renowned dancers or drummers. Even when we went to the Caribbean, I packaged the adventure. But the details of their daily lives were too often relegated to other caretakers. I wanted to give the children all they wanted, all I hadn’t had. In so doing, I may have deprived them of what they needed most: the grit, and the tools, to take on the world and make their own way.
Adrienne, my eldest, was the least affected by my imperfect parenting, in large part because she was the eldest. She’d had eight years, at least, of two parents together, and a strong enough bond with me that when Marguerite and I separated, Mrs. Byrd couldn’t work that dark magic on her. As she reached adolescence, Adrienne also acquired a new, quite wonderful stepfather.
Dr. Edward Mazique was just the man Marguerite should have married in the first place, or perhaps more to the point, the son-in-law her parents wanted all along. A graduate of Atlanta’s Morehouse College—the most distinguished of the historical black colleges—and a highly c
redited surgeon, he’d actually met Marguerite years before, in a professional capacity, when she was pregnant with Adrienne! Marguerite had been in considerable pain, and another doctor had diagnosed appendicitis. Young Dr. Mazique had correctly diagnosed that Marguerite just had a restless baby perched on her kidney. More than a decade later, when Dr. Mazique had become the head of the National Medical Association—the black counterpart of the American Medical Association—they met again, and married, setting up a new life, with Adrienne and Shari, in Washington, D.C. Dr. Mazique and I ran together a lot; he was a gracious, urbane fellow, and also very kind to me; not long after he married Marguerite, in 1965, he and Martin ganged up to get me an honorary degree from Morehouse. So this New York high school dropout had become, in a sense, a “Morehouse man,” too.
After graduating from Windsor Mountain, Adrienne had chosen to attend West Virginia State College, one of the historically black colleges, in part because one of Marguerite’s brothers was on the faculty. In fact, the school had opened its doors to white students beginning in the mid-1950s, after Brown v. Board of Education. Over time, the college, which had been 100 percent black, became 80 percent white. Among the white students was a tall Missourian named David Biesemeyer, with German Methodist roots. He fell in love with Adrienne, and she with him. Marguerite was furious. “Why did you let her end up with that white man?” she railed at her brother the professor. It was a nasty streak in the Byrd family that I’d noticed early on. Marguerite sent Adrienne to study at the University of the Americas in Puebla, Mexico, hoping the romance would cool, but David followed her there. Marguerite kept trying to talk them into breaking up. Not only did they ignore her; they got married.
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