Thoroughly committed to his work, Adams often put in eighteen-hour days for weeks on end. He was a gregarious fellow, brimming with energy and enthusiasm. An exuberant correspondent (his letters are filled with exclamation points), it's estimated that over the course of his life he wrote in the neighborhood of one hundred thousand letters and cards.
Michael, Adams's son, was raised in Yosemite National Park in a house teeming with artists and creative people. As a boy, he often traveled with his father, and in 1941 he was there when Ansel Adams made what was to become his most well-known photograph, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico. Here at the end of 1953, during the Korean War, Ansel Adams writes to twenty-year-old Michael, who had just joined the Air Force.
Yosemite National Park
Christmas 1953
Dear Mike—
I began this letter in San Francisco but am just finishing it up today in Yosemite. I never wrote a letter of this kind before, because I never had a son joining the Air Force before! The idea of Christmas is very strange to me at this time, but we have to keep up the illusion. I want to give you everything—but I can't think of a single thing you really need! That telephoto lens sounds good to me!
You are now a man, joining up with a very important part of our national defense. What is more important, you are taking your place in the pattern of our time (which exists whether we like it or not). I never joined up with anything; I have missed the peaks of such experience, and I envy you considerably. Now you are quite far from the little boy in Michael and Anne in Yosemite Valley—and yet I wonder how far you can get—or really want to get—from that particular kind of reality. I doubt if you can ever realize the advantages of being raised in Yosemite—only outsiders could grasp the potentials. But such a life would have value only if it instilled in you some awareness of intangible qualities beyond the ordinary. I think it has done this for you, and that you will fully appreciate them in the future.
I have spent a good part of my life trying to understand the obligations of a parent! The conventional idea of a parent is very obnoxious to me. We gave you considerable freedom of being—it was a pet theory of ours. I think it worked out quite well; I see nothing about you that I am not proud of!
If you are man enough to join the Air Force, you are man enough to comprehend the problems surrounding us. I have never talked much about “morality” because I trusted your innate sense of values to carry you through and I distrust words written or spoken about wordless things. I have had quite a lot to do with the external world—and quite a lot with the internal world, too. I am wondering, in the afternoon of my own life, just what your day will be. It will take much effort, devotion and compassion—something beyond the thin skin of morality—to bring you to a full realization of what it is to be a man in the face of the world as it now is and in the face of a perplexing future. You cannot be misled by the obvious “easy” way—there isn't any!
When you go to Fresno on the 28th you take on a whole new world of experience—and you carry a lot of the experience of your mother and father with you—which is there to help you if you need it. You are entering a bright new world of your own. The skies are the new land—I envy you, and if I were younger I would like to be up there, too.
We cannot grasp the full meaning of your new life to you, but we would like to share just a little of it with you. Please make a special effort to write us often—to your mother especially. I don't think this is too much to ask.
Good luck—all our love!!!
Ansel
HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., TO
MAGGIE AND LIZA GATES
“I hope that it brings you even a small measure of
understanding, at long last, of why we see
the world with such different eyes . . .”
With a rare combination of intellect and entrepreneurial spirit, Henry Louis Gates, the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor at Harvard, has worked tirelessly and successfully to elevate African-American studies to the scholarly level of an independent academic discipline. He is a writer, a teacher, a literary critic, an outspoken educational reformer, and through his scholarship we now have the earliest known literary works by African-American women—two novels written in the 1850s—Hannah Crafts's The Bondswoman's Narrative and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig.
We study literature, culture, and history so that we may better understand. In 1994 Gates published a book about his growing-up years in the 1950s and 1960s in West Virginia. The book began as a series of letters to his two young daughters—letters written so they might better understand from where and from whom they had come. The following letter to Maggie and Liza Gates is also the introduction to Gates's memoir, Colored People.
Dear Maggie and Liza:
I have written to you because a world into which I was born, a world that nurtured and sustained me, has mysteriously disappeared. My darkest fear is that Piedmont, West Virginia, will cease to exist, if some executives on Park Avenue decide that it is more profitable to build a completely new paper mill elsewhere than to overhaul one a century old. Then they would close it, just as they did in Cumberland with Celanese, and Pittsburgh Plate Glass, and the Kelly-Springfield Tire Company. The town will die, but our people will not move. They will not be moved. Because for them, Piedmont—snuggled between the Allegheny Mountains and the Potomac River Valley—is life itself.
I have written to you because of the day when we were driving home and you asked your mother and me just exactly what the civil rights movement had been all about and I pointed to a motel on Route 2 and said that at one time I could not have stayed there. Your mother could have stayed there, but your mother couldn't have stayed there with me. And you kids looked at us like we were telling you the biggest lie you had ever heard. So I thought about writing to you.
I have written for another reason, as well. I remember that once we were walking in Washington, D.C., heading for the National Zoo, and you asked me if I had known the man to whom I had just spoken. I said no. And, Liza, you volunteered that you found it embarrassing that I would speak to a complete stranger on the street. It called to mind a trip I'd made to Pittsburgh with my father. On the way from his friend Mr. Ozzie Washington's sister's house, I heard Daddy speak to a colored man, then saw him tip his hat to the man's wife. (Daddy liked nice hats: Caterpillar hats for work, Dobbs hats for Sunday.) It's just something that you do, he said, when I asked him if he had known those people and why had he spoken to them.
Last summer, I sat at a sidewalk café in Italy, and three or four “black” Italians walked casually by, as well as a dozen or more blacker Africans. Each spoke to me, rather, each nodded his head slightly or acknowledged me by a glance, ever so subtly. When I was growing up, we always did this with each other, passing boats in a sea of white folk.
Yet there were certain Negroes who would avoid acknowledging you in this way in an integrated setting, especially if the two of you were the ones doing the integrating. Don't go over there with those white people if all you're going to do is Jim Crow yourselves—Daddy must have said that to me a thousand times. And by that I think he meant we shouldn't cling to each other out of habit or fear, or use protective coloration to evade the risks of living like any other human being, or use clannishness as a cop-out for exploring ourselves and possibly making new selves, forged in the crucible of integration. Your black ass, he'd laugh, is integrated already.
But there are other reasons that people distrust the reflex—the nod, the glance, the murmured greeting.
One reason is a resentment at being lumped together with thirty million African Americans whom you don't know and most of whom you will never know. Completely by the accident of racism, we have been bound together with people with whom we may or may not have something in common, just because we are “black.” Thirty million Americans are black, and thirty million is a lot of people. One day you wonder: What do the misdeeds of a Mike Tyson have to do with me? So why do I feel implicated? And how can I not feel racial recrimination when I
can feel racial pride?
Then, too, there were Negroes who were embarrassed about being Negroes, who didn't want to be bothered with race and with other black people. One of the more painful things about being colored was being colored in public around other colored people, who were embarrassed to be colored and embarrassed that we both were colored and in public together. As if to say: “Negro, will you pul-lease disappear so that I can get my own white people?” As if to say: “I'm not a Negro like other Negroes.” As if to say: “I am a human being—let me be!”
For much of my adolescence and adulthood, I thought of these people as having betrayed the race. I used to walk up to them and call them Brother or Sister, loud and with a sardonic edge, when they looked like they were trying to “escape.” When I went off to college, I would make the “conversion” of errant classmates a serious project, a political commitment.
I used to reserve my special scorn for those Negroes who were always being embarrassed by someone else in the race. Someone too dark, someone too “loud,” someone too “wrong.” Someone who dared to wear red in public. Loud and wrong: we used to say that about each other. Nigger is loud and wrong. “Loud” carried a triple meaning: speaking too loudly, dressing too loudly, and just being too loudly.
I do know that, when I was a boy, many Negroes would have been the first to censure other Negroes once they were admitted into all-white neighborhoods or schools or clubs. “An embarrassment to the race”—phrases of that sort were bandied about. Accordingly, many of us in our generation engaged in strange antics to flout those strictures. Like eating watermelon in public, eating it loudly and merrily, and spitting the seeds into the middle of the street, red juice running down the sides of our cheeks, collecting under our chins. Or taking the greatest pride in the Royal Kink. Uncle Harry used to say he didn't like watermelon, which I knew was a lie because I saw him wolf down slices when I was a little kid, before he went off to seminary at Boston University. But he came around, just like he came around to painting God and Jesus black, and all the seraphim and the cherubim, too. And I, from another direction, have gradually come around, also, and stopped trying to tell other Negroes how to be black.
Do you remember when your mother and I woke you up early on a Sunday morning, just to watch Nelson Mandela walk out of prison, and how it took a couple of hours for him to emerge, and how you both wanted to go back to bed and, then, to watch cartoons? And how we began to worry that something bad had happened to him on the way out, because the delay was so long? And when he finally walked out of that prison, how we were so excited and teary-eyed at Mandela's nobility, his princeliness, his straight back and unbowed head? I think I felt that there walked the Negro, as Pop might have said; there walked the whole of the African people, as regal as any king. And that feeling I had, that gooseflesh sense of identity that I felt at seeing Nelson Mandela, listening to Mahalia Jackson sing, watching Muhammad Ali fight, or hearing Martin Luther King speak, is part of what I mean by being colored. I realize the sentiment may not be logical, but I want to have my cake and eat it, too. Which is why I still nod or speak to black people on the streets and why it felt so good to be acknowledged by the Afro-Italians who passed my table at the café in Milan.
I want to be able to take special pride in a Jessye Norman aria, a Muhammad Ali shuffle, a Michael Jordan slam dunk, a Spike Lee movie, a Thurgood Marshall opinion, a Toni Morrison novel, a James Brown's Camel Walk. Above all, I enjoy the unselfconscious moments of a shared cultural intimacy, whatever form they take, when no one else is watching, when no white people are around. Like Joe Louis's fights, which my father still talks about as part of the fixed repertoire of stories that texture our lives. You've seen his eyes shining as he describes how Louis hit Max Schmeling so many times and so hard, and how some reporter asked him, after the fight: “Joe, what would you have done if that last punch hadn't knocked Schmeling out?” And how ole Joe responded, without missing a beat: “I'da run around behind him to see what was holdin' him up!”
Even so, I rebel at the notion that I can't be part of other groups, that I can't construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American? So I'm divided. I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time—but to do so in order to come out the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color. Bach and James Brown. Sushi and fried catfish. Part of me admires those people who can say with a straight face that they have transcended any attachment to a particular community or group . . . but I always want to run around behind them to see what holds them up.
I am not Everynegro. I am not native to the great black metropolises: New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, say. Nor can I claim to be a “citizen of the world.” I am from and of a time and a place—Piedmont, West Virginia—and that's a world apart, a world of difference. So this is not a story of a race but a story of a village, a family, and its friends. And of a sort of segregated peace. What hurt me most about the glorious black awakening of the late sixties and early seventies is that we lost our sense of humor. Many of us thought that enlightened politics excluded it.
In your lifetimes, I suspect, you will go from being African Americans, to “people of color,” to being, once again, “colored people.” (The linguistic trend toward condensation is strong.) I don't mind any of the names myself. But I have to confess that I like “colored” best, maybe because when I hear the word, I hear it in my mother's voice and in the sepia tones of my childhood. As artlessly and honestly as I can, I have tried to evoke a colored world of the fifties, a Negro world of the early sixties, and the advent of a black world of the later sixties, from the point of view of the boy I was. When you are old enough to read what follows, I hope that it brings you even a small measure of understanding, at long last, of why we see the world with such different eyes . . . and why that is for me a source both of gladness and of regret. And I hope you'll understand why I continue to speak to colored people I pass on the streets.
Love,
Daddy
Piedmont, West Virginia
July 8, 1993
Elsie, Mabel (wife), Daisy, and Alexander Graham Bell
Lincoln Steffens and son Pete
The Developing
Mind
JOHN ADAMS TO
ABIGAIL “NABBY” ADAMS SMITH
“In your solitary hours, my dear daughter, you will have a delightful opportunity of attending to the
education of your children . . .”
John Adams knew firsthand what education could do for a person. The son of a farmer and a mother who was likely illiterate, he was granted a scholarship at age fifteen to Harvard College and the world opened before him. With his own children he was constantly advising them on what to read, what to learn, and what was important to know, and when he became a grandfather his interest in the education of his grandchildren was strong indeed. He was, too, a man of his times and he believed, most respectfully, that it was the mother's duty and “delightful opportunity” to educate her young children.
Here, Adams writes to his thirty-two-year-old daughter, Abigail—known as “Nabby”—about her role in the developing minds of her three sons. Newly elected president of the United States, he would be inaugurated on March 4, 1797, less than two weeks hence. The election to replace George Washington was bitterly factional. As well, no precedent had yet been set for how a new president would select his cabinet. It all weighed heavily upon him.
Philadelphia, Feb. 21st, 1797
Dear Child:
I believe I have not acknowledged your favour of the 20th January, which I received in its season.
I hope your apprehensions that “the party who have embarrassed the President, and exerted themselves to divide the election, will endeavour to render my situation as uncomfortable as possible,” will be found to be without sufficient foundation;
I have seen, on the contrary, a disposition to acquiesce, and hope it will increase. I am not at all alarmed; I know my countrymen very well.
If the way to do good to my country, were to render myself popular, I could easily do it. But extravagant popularity is not the road to public advantage.
By the 4th of March I shall know what to do. I cannot build my house till the foundation is laid; at present I know not what house I shall have, nor what means to furnish it. These things will be determined in ten days. At present I believe it will be best for your mother to remain where she is until October. I shall go to her as soon as I can.
Your brother John continues to give the highest satisfaction to government by his great industry, his deep discernment, his independent spirit, and his splendid talents. I hear such commendations of him as no other man abroad obtains.
In your solitary hours, my dear daughter, you will have a delightful opportunity of attending to the education of your children, to give them a taste and attachment to study, and to books. A taste for science and literature, added to a turn for business, never can fail of success in life. Without learning, nothing very great can ever be accomplished in the way of business. But not only a thirst for knowledge should be excited, and a taste for letters be cultivated, but prudence, patience, justice, temperance, resolution, modesty, and self-cultivation, should be recommended to them as early as possible. The command of their passions, the restraints of their appetites, reverence for superiors, especially parents, a veneration for religion, morals, and good conduct.
You will find it more for your happiness to spend your time with them in this manner, than to be engaged in fashionable amusements, and social entertainments, even with the best company.
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