The Cross of Redemption (21 page)

What, indeed, you may well ask, has all this to do with
The Making of Jazz
—a book concerned, innocently and earnestly enough, with the creation of black American music?

That music is produced by, and bears witness to, one of the most obscene adventures in the history of mankind. It is a music which creates,
as what we call History cannot sum up the courage to do, the response to that absolutely universal question:
Who am I? What am I doing here?

How did King Oliver, Ma Rainey, Bessie, Armstrong—a roll call more vivid than what is called History—Bird, Dolphy, Powell, Pettiford, Coltrane, Jelly Roll Morton, the Duke—or the living, again, too long a roll call: Miss Nina Simone, Mme Mary Lou Williams, Carmen McRae, the Count, Ray, Miles, Max—forgive me, children, for all the names I cannot call. How did they, and how
do
they, confront that question—and make of that captivity a song?

For the music began in captivity, and is still, absolutely, created in captivity. So much for the European vanity, which imagines that with the single word “history” it controls the “past,” defines the “present”; and therefore cannot but suppose that the “future” will prove to be as willing to be brought into captivity as the slaves they imagine themselves to have discovered, as the “nigger” they had no choice but to invent.

Be careful of inventions: the invention describes you, and will certainly betray you. Speaking as the son of the Preacher Man, I know that it was never intended, in any way whatever, that either the Father or the Son should be heard. Take that any way you will: I am trying to be precise.

If you know—as a black American
must
know, discovers at his mother’s breast, and then in the eyes of his father—that the world which calls itself “white” and which has the further, unspeakable cowardice of calling itself “free”—if you will dare imagine that I, speaking now as a black witness to the white condition, see you in a way that you cannot afford to see me, if you can see that the invention of the black condition creates the trap of the white identity, you will see that what a black man
knows
about a white man stems, inexorably, from the white man’s description of who, and what, he takes to be the other—in this case, the black cat: me.

You watch this innocent criminal destroying your father, day by day, hour by hour—your
father!
—despising your mother, your brothers, and your sisters; and this innocent criminal will cut you down without any mercy if any one of you dares to say a word about it.

And not only is he trying to kill you. He would also like you to be his accomplice—discreet and noiseless accomplice—in this friendly, democratic, and, alas, absolutely indispensable action. “I didn’t,” he will tell you, “make the world.”

You think, but you don’t say, to your friendly murderer, who, sincerely, means you no harm: “Well, baby, somebody better. And, in a great big hurry.”

Thus, you begin to see; so, you begin to sing and dance; for those responsible for your captivity require of you a song. You begin the unimaginable horror of contempt and hatred; then, the horror of self-contempt and self-hatred. “What did I do? to be so black, and blue?” If you survive—as, for example, the “sociopath” Yardbird did not, as the “junkie” Billie Holiday did not—you are released onto the tightrope tension of bearing in mind, every hour, every second, drunk, or sober, in sickness or in health, those whom you must not even begin to depend on for the truth, and those to whom you must not lie.

It is hard to be black, and therefore officially, and lethally, despised. It is harder than that to despise so many of the people who think of themselves as white, before whose blindness you present the obligatory historical grin.

And it is harder than that, out of this devastation—Ezekiel’s valley: “Oh, Lord, can these bones live?”—to trust life, and to live a life, to love, and be loved.

It is out of this, and much more than this, that black American music springs. This music begins on the auction block.

Now, whoever is unable to face this—the auction block; whoever cannot see that that auction block is the demolition, by Europe, of all human standards: a demolition accomplished, furthermore, at that hour of the world’s history, in the name of “civilization”; whoever pretends that the slave mother does not weep, until this hour, for her slaughtered son, that the son does not weep for his slaughtered father; or whoever pretends that the white father did not, literally, and knowing what he was doing, hang, and burn, and castrate, his black son—whoever cannot face this can never pay the price for the “beat” which is the key to music, and the key to life.

Music is our witness, and our ally. The “beat” is the confession which recognizes, changes, and conquers time.

Then, history becomes a garment we can wear, and share, and not a cloak in which to hide; and time becomes a friend.

(1979)

·      ·     ·

I
SHALL BEGIN BY SAYING
a very difficult thing. Sometimes it happens that you walk into a response which almost makes your presence and your response a little, not exactly redundant, but close to that. We all know why we are here. So all I can do is comment on the reasons for our presence here tonight and on the fact, as I put it in London, where they believe in history, that this is a historical event. We are speaking inevitably in the shadow of, and we’ll get around to this in a moment, the question of black English, a question which has only come up in this country, as of this date.

I want to suggest that history is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We
are
our history. If we pretend otherwise, to put it very brutally, we literally are criminals. We just saw our history, just heard it, not five minutes ago [referring to the Tennessee Baptist Choir’s rendition of black history in song]. I have been to a place which the Western
world pretends has not happened. I’m talking about the auction block. We are also talking about the automobile assembly line. I want to make this clear, sitting in your town, talking in your town. One of the architects of this peculiar town is a man named Henry Ford, who is probably responsible for building it—paying workers, black and white; clubbing down workers, black and white—who was a friend of Hitler’s; who was no friend of the Jews. (He hadn’t yet heard about us.) I challenge anyone alive to challenge me on that.

Now, in this peculiar place, in this peculiar time, in this peculiar country, we have had an argument which presents itself as being concerned with the validity of what is called “black English.” No one has yet demanded of Thomas Jefferson or his heirs in exactly what language they wrote the Declaration of Independence. Once one has reminded this country of the fact that, in perfect English, it was written, and not a thousand years ago, in an official document, that black men had no rights which white men were bound to respect. It was not a thousand years ago, the Dred Scott decision. It was not a thousand years ago that a black man was declared three-fifths of a man. I am almost old enough to remember it. I missed it by a very short time.

Actually, we all know something very important that has brought me here. Let me try to spell it out for you, again. And let me suggest that the argument concerning black English is one of the most dishonest arguments in the history of a spectacularly dishonest nation. I kid you not. I grew up in Harlem. I was a shoeshine boy. I scrubbed toilets. And I can still cook. I was dealing with cops before I was seven years old and sleeping in basements before I was ten, watching my mother and my father, my brothers and my sisters, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, living as though every day was going to be our last. Now, how exactly do you expect me to explain that, to describe that to Greer Garson when she comes to teach me English? There is an irreducible gap between my teacher and my experience, between my teacher and my education. I would not have said it when I was ten, could not have said it when I was thirteen, but I can say it now: I don’t want anyone I love, including my nieces, my nephews, my great-nieces, my great-nephews, to grow up to be like Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and all those people.

I tell you something else, a
very
important matter. The language forged by black people in this country, on this continent, as the choir just told you, got us from one place to another.
We
described the auction block. We described what it meant to be there. We survived what it meant to be torn
from your mother, your father, your brother, your sister. We described it. We survived being described as mules, as having been put on earth only for the convenience of white people. We survived having
nothing
belonging to us, not your mother, not your father, not your daughter, not your son. And
we
created the only language in this country.

We are the only people in this country, in this part of the North American wilderness, who have never denied their ancestors. A very important matter, for the price of the American ticket—from Russia, from Italy, from Spain, from England—was to pretend you didn’t know where you came from; and, furthermore, that you would not pay dues for where you came from. It’s called “upward mobility.” No one with a job in England got on the
Mayflower
. I’m the only American who knows he didn’t want to come here. I know what is happening in Boston is that all those descendants of the Irish potato famine came here. The price of the ticket was to cease being Irish, cease being Greek, cease being Russian, cease being whatever you had been before, and to become “white.” And
that
is why this country says it’s a white country and really believes it is.

I beg you to bear in mind when I use the word “white” that I am
not
talking as the other side of the Ku Klux Klan. There is no one, there is not a living soul in this country, who can prove he is white. Not one! They can’t prove that they’re white because I’ve been here too long, and that’s the truth, no matter how they cut it. My problems are not
only
black; my problems are also
white
. They know it. They lynched me, they burned me, they castrated me
—knowing
what they were doing—and they’re doing it until this hour.
That
is what these arguments are about.

A child comes to school—better say
my
child—five or six years old, and meets Greer Garson. He just does what everybody else does, especially children: he describes his environment. You describe your environment in order to control it, in order to find out what it is, in order to find out who and where you are. That is what a child does—this is wood, this is paper, this is fire. You got to find out the reality which surrounds you. You got to be able to describe it. You got to be able to describe your mother and your father and your uncles and your junkie cousin. If you aren’t able to describe it, you will not be able to survive it.

Now, I described to Greer Garson what happened to my father last night, who just came out of jail. Why doesn’t he get a job? Why doesn’t he get a
job
? The only people in the world who will not be fooled are children. A child knows if you despise him. And if you despise that child, he will not learn anything from you.

Now, one hears from a long time ago that “white is merely a state of mind.” I add to that, white is a moral choice. It’s up to you to be as white as you want to be and pay the price of that ticket. You cannot tell a black man by the color of skin, either. But this is a democracy.

A child knows that the teacher despises his attempts to describe what happened to his father, to describe his living room—by that time he’s already too old to describe the roaches and the rats. He is too young to describe the landlord and too frightened to describe the streets—and yet he is trying to control his environment. That is what and why he’s trying to articulate. And yet, the teacher—and in this case the teacher is America—despises him and his descriptions. They manage to create, deliberately, in every generation, the nigger they want to see.

That is how it happens, and it is not an act of God. Do you understand what I’m saying? The most famous American opera, the greatest American opera, the
only
American opera, as far as I know, is called
Porgy and Bess
. Tell me what language that was written in and by whom. “Summertime”—what about the other lines? In short, Mr. Heyward, whom I have nothing against at all, could describe us, or the man who wrote
Show Boat
. We, the blacks, can be described by others, but we are forbidden to describe ourselves.

Not a thousand years ago, it was illegal to teach a slave to read. Not a thousand years ago, the Supreme Court decided that separate could not be equal. And today, as we sit here, no one is learning anything in this country. You see a nation which is the leader of the rest of the world, that had to pay the price of
that
ticket, and the price of
that
ticket is we’re sitting in the most illiterate nation in the world. THE MOST ILLITERATE NATION IN THE WORLD. A monument to illiteracy. And if you doubt me, all you have to do is spend a day in Washington. I am serious as a heart attack.

I’m trying to say something, and I want you to hear it. We
have
no models. The black American
has
no antecedent.
We
, in this country,
on
this continent, in the most despairing terms, created an identity which had never been seen before in the history of the world. We created that music. Nobody else did, and the world lives from it, though it doesn’t pay us for it. In the storm which has got to overtake the Western world, we are the only bridge between their history which is the past and their history which is the present. We are the only black Westerners. We are the only people under heaven, the black Americans, who have paid so much for their father’s father’s father’s father’s father and mother.