The Cross of Redemption (20 page)

Black people find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Our presence in this country terrifies every white man walking. This nation is not now, never has been, and now never will be a white country. There is not a white person in this country, including our President and all his friends, who can
prove
he’s white.

The people who settled this country came from many places. It was not so elsewhere in the world. In France, they were French; in England, they were English; in Italy, they were Italian; in Greece, they were Greek; in
Russia, they were Russian. From this I want to point out a paradox: blacks, Indians, Chicanos, Asians, and that beleaguered handful of white people who understand their history are the only people who know who they are.

When the Europeans arrived in America, there was a moment in their lives when they had to learn to speak English, when they became guys named Joe. Guys named Joe couldn’t speak to their fathers because their fathers couldn’t speak English. That meant a rupture, a profound rupture, with their own history, so that they could become guys named Joe. And in doing so, Joe never found out anything else about himself.

Black people in this country come out of a history which was never written down. The links between father and son, between mother and daughter, until this hour and despite all the dangers and trials to which we have been subjected, remain strong and alive. And if we could do that—and we have done that—then we can deal with what now lies before us.

Every white person in this country—and I do not care what he or she says—knows one thing. They may not know, as they put it, “what I want,” but they know
they would not like to be black here
. If they know that, then they know everything they need to know, and whatever else they say is a lie.

The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white. It is a trick bag, because they know perfectly well that I can never become white. I’ve drunk my share of dry martinis. I have proved myself civilized in every way I can. But there is an irreducible difficulty. Something doesn’t work. Well, I decided that I might as well act like a nigger.

The black people of this country stand in a very strange place, as do the white people of this country—and almost for the very same reason, though we approach it from different points of view. I suggest that what the rulers of this country don’t know about the world which surrounds them is the price they pay for not knowing me. If they couldn’t deal with my father, how are they going to deal with the people in the streets of Tehran? I could have told them, if they had asked.

There is a reason that no one wants our children educated. When we attempt to do it ourselves, we find ourselves up against a vast machinery of racism which infects the country’s entire system of education. I know the machinery is vast, ruthless, cunning, and thinks of nothing, in fact, but itself, which means us, because we are a threat to the machinery. We have already lived through a slave rebellion. We cannot pick up guns, because they’ve got the guns. We cannot hit those streets again, because they’re waiting for us. We have to do something else.

Before each slave rebellion there occurred something which I now call “noncooperation” by the slaves. How to execute this in detail today is something each one of us has to figure out. But we could begin with the schools—by taking our children out of those schools, taking them off those buses. Everybody knows, who thinks about it, that you can’t change a school without changing a neighborhood, and you can’t change a neighborhood without changing the city, and there ain’t nobody prepared to change the city, because they want the city to be white. America’s cities are going to crumble when the white people move out to get away from the niggers. Every crisis in every city is caused by that. How can we expect people who cannot educate their
own
children to educate anybody else? This will be, well, contested.

But black people hold the trump. When you try to slaughter people, you create a people with nothing to lose. And if I have nothing to lose, what are you going to do to me? In truth, we have one thing to lose—our children. Yet we have never lost them, and there is no reason for us to do it now.

We hold the trump. I say it: patience, and shuffle the cards.

(1979)

·      ·     ·

J
ULY
29, 1979

I
WILL LET THE DATE STAND:
but it is a false date. My typewriter has been silent since July 6th, and the piece of paper I placed in the typewriter on that day has been blank until this hour.

July 29th was—is—my baby sister’s birthday. She is now thirty-six years old, is married to a beautiful cat, and they have a small son, my nephew, one of my many nephews. My baby sister was born on the day our father died: and I could not but wonder what she, or our father, or her son, my nephew, could possibly make of this compelling investigation of our lives.

It is compelling indeed, like the nightmare called history: and compelling because the author is as precise as he is deluded.

Allow me, for example, to paraphrase, and parody, one of his statements, and I am not trying to be unkind:

Well, then:
There have been two authentic geniuses in art. One of them, of course, was Michelangelo, the much beloved court jester, striving to please the Pope. The other was a misfit named Rembrandt, who managed… to destroy his career—and finally himself
.

If one can believe the first statement, there is absolutely no reason to doubt the second. Which may be why no one appears to learn anything from history—I am beginning to suspect that no one
can
learn anything from the nightmare called history. These are my reasons, anyway, for attempting to report on this report from such a dangerous point of view.

I have learned a great deal from traversing, struggling with, this book. It is my life, my history, which is being examined—defined: therefore, it is my obligation to attempt to clarify the record. I do not want my nephew—or, for that matter, my Swiss godson, or my Italian godson—to believe this “comprehensive” history.

People cannot be studied from a distance. It is perfectly possible that we cannot be studied at all: God’s anguish, perhaps, upon being confronted with His creation. People certainly cannot be studied from a safe distance, or from the distance which we call safety. No one is, or can be, the other: there is nothing in the other, from the depths to the heights, which is not to be found in me. Of course, it can be said that, “objectively” speaking, I do not have the temperament of an Idi Amin, or Somoza, or Hitler, or Bokassa. Our careers do not resemble each others’, and for that I do thank God. Yet, I am aware that, at some point in time and space, our aspirations may have been very similar, or had we met, at some point in time and space—at school, say, or looking for work, or at the corner bar—we might have had every reason to think so. They are men, after all, like me; mortal, like me; and all men reflect, are mirrors for, each other. It is the most fatal of all delusions, I think, not to know this: and the root of cowardice.

For neither I nor anyone else could have known from the beginning what roads we would travel, what choices we would make, nor what the result of these choices would be: in ourselves, in time and space, and in
that nightmare we call history. Where, then, is placed the “objective” speaker, who can speak only after, and never before, the fact? Who may or may not have perceived (or received) the truth, whatever the
truth
may be? What does it mean to be “objective”? What is meant by “temperament”? And how does temperament relate to experience? For I do not know, will never know, and neither will you, whether it is my experience which is responsible for my temperament, or my temperament which must be taken to task for my experience.

I am attacking, of course, the basis of the language—or, perhaps, the
intention
of the language—in which history is written; am speaking as the son of the Preacher Man. This is exactly how the music called
jazz
began, and out of the same necessity: not only to redeem a history unwritten and despised, but to checkmate the European notion of the world. For until this hour, when we speak of history, we are speaking only of how Europe saw—and sees—the world.

But there is a very great deal in the world which Europe does not, or cannot, see: in the very same way that the European musical scale cannot transcribe—cannot write down, does not understand—the notes, or the price, of this music.

Now, the author’s research is meticulous. Collier has had to “hang” in many places—has “been there,” as someone predating “jazz” might put it: but he has not, as one of my more relentless sisters might put it, “been there and back.”

My more relentless sister is merely, in actuality, paraphrasing, or bearing witness to, Bessie Smith: “picked up my bag, baby, and I tried it again.” And so is Billie Holiday, proclaiming—not complaining—that “my man wouldn’t want me no breakfast/Wouldn’t give me no dinner/Squawked about my supper/And threw me out doors/Had the nerve to lay/A matchbox on my clothes.”

“I didn’t,” Billie tells us, “have so many. But I had a long, long ways to go.”

Thus, Aretha Franklin demands “Respect,” having “stolen” the song from Otis Redding (as Otis Redding tells it, sounding strangely delighted to declare himself the victim of this sociopathological act). Aretha dared to “steal” the song from Otis because not many men, of any color, are able to make the enormous confession, the tremendous recognition, contained in “try a little tenderness.”

And if you can’t get no satisfaction, you may find yourself boiling a bitch’s brew while waiting for someone to bring me my gin! or start walking
toward the weeping willow tree or ramble where you find strange fruit—black, beige, and brown—hanging just across the tracks where it’s tight like that and you do not let the sun catch you crying. It is always “Farewell to Storyville.”

For this celebrated number has only the most passing, and, in truth, impertinent, reference to the red-light district of New Orleans, or to the politician for whom it was named: a certain Joseph Story. What a curious way to enter, briefly, history, only to be utterly obliterated by it: which is exactly what is happening to Henry Kissinger. If you think I am leaping, you are entirely right. Go back to Miles, Max, Dizzy, Yardbird, Billie, Coltrane: who were not, as the striking—not to say quaint—European phrase would have it, “improvising”: who can afford to improvise, at those prices?

By the time of “Farewell to Storyville,” and long before that time, the demolition of black quarters—for that is what they were, and are, considered—was an irreducible truth of black life. This is what Bessie Smith is telling us, in “Back Water Blues.” This song has as much to do with a flood as “Didn’t It Rain” has to do with Noah, or as “If I Had My Way” has to do with Samson and Delilah, and poor Samson’s excess of hair. Or, if I may leap again, there is a song being born, somewhere, as I write, concerning the present “boat people,” which will inform us, in tremendous detail, how ships are built. There is a dreadful music connecting the building of ovens with the activity of contractors, the reality of businessmen (to say nothing of business) and the reality of bankers and flags, and the European middle class, and its global progeny, and Gypsies, Jews, and soap: and profit.

The music called “jazz” came into existence as an exceedingly laconic description of black circumstances, and as a way, by describing these circumstances, of overcoming them. It was necessary that the description be laconic: the iron necessity being that the description not be overheard. Or, as the indescribably grim remnants of the European notion of the “nation-state” would today put it, it was absolutely necessary that the description not be “decoded.” It has not been “decoded,” by the way, any more than the talking drum has been decoded. I will try to tell you why.

I have said that people cannot be described from a distance. I will now contradict myself and say that people
can
be described from a distance: the distance that they themselves have established between themselves and what we must, helplessly, here, call life. Life comes out of music, and music comes out of life: without trusting the first, it is impossible to create the second. The rock against which the European notion of the nation-state
has crashed is nothing more—and absolutely nothing less—than the question of identity:
Who am I? And what am I doing here?

This question is the very heart, and root, of the music we are discussing: and contains (if it is possible to make this distinction) not so much a moral judgment as a precise one.

The Irish, for example, as it now, astoundingly, turns out, never had the remotest desire to become English; neither do the people of Scotland, or Wales; and one can suppose that the people of Canada, trapped as they are between Alaska and Mexico, with only the heirs of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny between themselves and these two definitely unknown ports of call, distract themselves with the question of whether they are French or English only because their history has now allowed them the breathing space to find out what in God’s name(!) it means to be Canadian. The Basques do not wish to be French
or
Spanish; Kurds and Berbers do not wish to be Iranian
or
Turkish.

If one travels from Naples, to Rome, to Torino, it can by no means be taken for granted that the “nation”—hammered into a “nation,” after all, quite recently—ever agreed, among themselves, to be that. The same is true of an equally arbitrary invention, Germany: Bavaria is not Berlin. For that matter, to be in Haifa is not at all like being in Jerusalem, and neither place resembles Nazareth. Examples abound: but at this moment, the only nations being discussed are those which have become utilitarian but otherwise useless—Sweden, for example, or Switzerland, which is not a nation, but a bank. There are those territories which are considered to be “restive” (Iran, Greece) or those which are “crucial,” or “unstable”—or, incomprehensibly, both: Japan, for example, is “crucial”
and
“unstable.” Peru, for the moment, is merely “unstable,” though one keeps on it a nervous eye: and though we know that there’s a whole lot of coffee in Brazil, we don’t know who’s going to drink it. Brazil threatens to become, as we quite remarkably put it, one of the “emerging” nations, like Nigeria, because those decisions, in those places, involve not merely continents, but the globe. Leaving aside the “crafty East”—China and Russia—there are only embarrassments, like the British colonial outpost named for a merciless, piratical
murderer/colonizer
named Cecil Rhodes.