Brother West (15 page)

I
HAD BEEN PLANNING MY
P
H
.D.
thesis for many years. I finally decided the thing had to get done. It was an important work for me, not merely an academic exercise. I say important because it touched on the issues that concerned me most. Before I got to my final thesis, I had already thrown away two separate hundred-page drafts on T.H. Green and the Aristotelian foundations of Marxist ethics. The thesis that got completed, though, was
The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought
.

Most people didn’t think Karl Marx had any ethics. They said he was obsessed with the notion of power. But I had read the essay written by seventeen-year-old Karl Marx called “Jesus Christ, Liberator of the World.” Karl’s dad was a Jewish convert who had changed his name from Herschel Mordechai to Heinrich Marx. Heinrich raised his son as a Lutheran. And Karl fell in love with a powerful aspect of Christ—the identification with suffering on the deepest level. In my thesis, I tell the story of how religion shaped Marx’s ethical sensibility before Marx became radically secular. Marxism and Christianity, I argue, are linked in ways that we cannot ignore. One does not cancel out the other. In fact, the rise of liberation theology in Latin America, where concern for the poor is linked to both a political and sacred agenda, is also linked to Marxism. No one, of course, has argued that Jesus wasn’t in solidarity with the poor. Now the question becomes—how do you transform Jesus’s love into social, political, and economic justice in the world today? I argue that Marx carries with him certain relics and remnants of the religious worldview he had embraced as a Lutheran, even as he calls into question the validity of a godhead and becomes an atheist.

My thesis was accepted and I became the first black person to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton. My sister Cynthia accompanied me to graduation. I shall never forget the lovely party in the famous Tower Room of 1879 Hall sponsored by Professors David Lewis, Thomas Scanlon, Richard Rorty, and Raymond Geuss after my final oral exam. A decade later my thesis—advised by Sheldon—was published in book form. I’m gratified that it’s still in print. It remains a record of what was going through my mind as the ’70s spilled over to the ’80s, a time when Ronald Reagan, our old nemesis from California, had ascended to the presidency. Reagan made it fashionable to be indifferent to the poor and gave permission to be greedy with little or no conscience.

D
URING THIS TIME, MY OWN
political activities accelerated. In addition to Sheldon Wolin and Raymond Geuss working on my thesis, two encounters had a tremendous impact on me. The first was my friendship with Stanley Aronowitz, the most enchanting intellectual interlocutor I had ever met. Stanley never stopped reading, never stopped analyzing the crisis of Marxist thought, never stopped pushing me into serious dialogue about the meaning of cultural politics. Both as an activist and thinker, Aronowitz energized my learning process. He and I helped found and taught at the Center for Workers’ Education in New York.

The second empowering influence was Michael Harrington. In the early ’80s, he formed the Democratic Socialists of America. It was the only multiracial organization whose progressive politics made me comfortable enough to actually join. I use the word “comfortable” cautiously. I had another take on Democratic Socialism, based on the work on Antonio Gramsci. I was a member of DSA, but a highly critical one. Yet Harrington’s humanity and wonderful sense of intellectual generosity allowed competing points of view. I loved Michael and count it a blessing to have toiled in the fields of social change alongside him for many years. In addition, I was fortunate to meet the renowned public intellectual Barbara Ehrenreich, for whom I have deep and abiding respect. After Michael’s death in 1989, she and I became honorary chairpersons of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA.)

After the completion of my thesis, I got on a writing roll that has never stopped. I put together the lectures I had been delivering in Brooklyn at Reverend Daughtry’s Pentecostal church, added to them and published my first and favorite book,
Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity
. A portion of the book was based on lectures that I delivered in San Jose, Costa Rica. Daughtry, by the way, began and led the National Black United Front. In the early days of Reagan’s national rule, the United Front was one of the only organizations pitting progressive politics against the president’s reactionary policies.

L
OOKING BACK,
I
SEE HOW,
at least to some extent, finally writing my thesis on Marx took me from the literary salon of the ’70s to the political battlefield of the ’80s. Of course, it was never that clearcut. I was politically involved in the ’70s and I was still obsessed with literature in the ’80s. The two have never been mutually exclusive. But there was definitely a shift. Hooking up with Michele, precisely at the time that her controversial book was published, drew me into a series of fascinating dialogues that were deeply political, not to mention racial. I relished those discussions, just as I relished my work toward social change alongside Michael Harrington and Stanley Aronowitz.

My thesis, no matter how imperfect, was my declaration of faith. Of course I came to faith, and remain in faith, as a prophetic Christian. In that regard, I must define myself as a non-Marxist socialist. Basic differences between Marxists and Christians can never be reconciled. I deal with fear and anxiety—with the sheer absurdity of the human condition—through the lens of the cross. Marxism has nothing to say about the existential meaning of suffering, death, or love. It is solely preoccupied with improving social conditions. But I know that my personal condition—then and now—needed the songs of James Brown and Marvin Gaye and the Reverend James Cleveland, the King of Gospel, singin’ ’bout “This Too Will Pass,” the same James Cleveland who said, “I Don’t Feel Noways Tired.” I can’t live along the slippery slope of life’s abyss without the Jesus that I saw in the heart of my mom, my dad, my brother, and my sisters.

I didn’t become a theologian for a single reason: I don’t believe that religious dogmas and doctrines can be rendered logically consistent and theoretically coherent. The scandal of the cross shatters all theological efforts. I didn’t become a full-blown philosopher because I saw so many philosophical truths outside of the philosophical canon
,
such as in the poetry of T.S. Eliot and the plays of Anton Chekhov. I became and remain a philosophically trained bluesman who looked to the good news of Jesus Christ. That’s the news, as I wrote in a new introduction to
The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought
, that “lures and links human struggles to the coming of the kingdom—hence the warding off of disempowering responses to despair, dread, disappointment and death.”

I say bluesman because the bluesman, who comes out of the black Christian culture, is telling the story differently. He has good news, but
his
news puts a different kind of hurtin’ on the gospel. His news says this
: If I sing my blues, I’ll lose my blues—at least for those precious moments when I’m singing.
His news says that the story of our lives—our losses, our depression, our angst—can be simplified and funkafied in a form that gives visceral pleasure and subversive joy, both to the bluesman and his audience.

We all got the blues. We all wanna lose our blues. We all gotta look for ways to do just that. What were my ways?

“THINK”

I
WAS ON THE VERGE OF MARRYING
Michele Wallace when my brother Cliff called and said, “You better think, Corn.” Cliff was quoting the Queen—Aretha had sung the daylights out of a song she’d co-written with Ted White called “Think.”

“You better think,” sang Aretha. “Let your mind go. Let yourself be free.”

The song was about freedom of all kinds.

“I think you better hold on to your freedom,” big bro argued. “You don’t wanna rush into anything crazy.”

“I’m crazy about Michele and she’s crazy about me.”

“I know she’s a wonderful woman,” Cliff said, “or you wouldn’t be so involved. All your women are wonderful, Corn. But I’m just wondering if y’all really know each other well enough to tie the knot. Why not just give it a little time?”

Strange thing about me and Cliff: close as we are, we don’t usually give each other advice about romantic relationships. We’ve both had a steep learning curve in this area. But we usually do what we do without consulting each other. So when my brother warned me about going too far too fast, I had to heed his words. I didn’t marry Michele.

Meeting Michele was a blessing, and living with her in New Haven was a joy. But Cliff was right. The relationship wouldn’t last. I’m challenged to tell you why. I’m challenged to understand the situation myself. It goes to the heart of many romantic involvements. I had grand hopes. I had dreams of long-lasting love. But I also had a calling that grew in intensity. The calling had me out there in the world, learning and teaching and dialoging with dozens of people whose minds nurtured my own. Women want and deserve inordinate attention. My attention was scattered, not by design but a force that I couldn’t control.

O
UTSIDE
U
NION
T
HEOLOGICAL
S
EMINARY,
New York City kept calling to me. Not only did I love going to shows, off-Broadway and on, not only did I frequent the dance clubs who played the jams that kept me moving, like Chic’s “Good Times,” I was always running up to the Apollo to catch the Isley Brothers, or Rufus with Chaka, or this new singer with the honeycomb voice named Luther Vandross.

The Apollo is where I caught DJ Hollywood, one of the founding architects of a musical/cultural form that would soon evolve into hip-hop. I got hooked from the get-go. I loved the technical innovation—using turntables as percussive instruments—and I loved the approach to storytelling: the voice, not sung, but spoken in a metric bark. It got to the people. It got to me. I saw how its freshness blossomed from a happy synthesis of unhappy socioeconomic facts. Music education was drastically cut in neighborhood schools. Poor kids couldn’t get their hands on instruments. So self-invented artists—like Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and Kool Herc—invented instruments of their own. Flash is the innovator whose Furious Five put out “The Message” about inner-city rage and black resistance, a theme echoing Marvin Gaye’s
What’s Going On
. He and his gifted brothers pulled radios and speakers out of discarded cars piled up in the junkyards of the South Bronx. They put together massive sound systems. They identified key sections to songs—the funkiest riffs, the baddest breakdowns, the parts where pure rhythm penetrated deepest—and ran them together in a manner that was itself wholly original. They created musical collages as brilliantly innovative as anything to emerge from elitist forms of avant-garde art. The early rappers were also startlingly fresh. I still have a bias toward Old School Hip-hop artists like my brothers KRS-One, Rakim, and Eric B. Their skill at rhyming, soon to grow more complex and technically dazzling, was evident from jump street. They rejected a white normative gaze. They understood that their gift of language—the poetic language of the streets where they were raised—was a special gift. They didn’t have to unlearn and relearn another lexicon to express their artistic souls. They could be themselves. They could come at the world with their own equipment, their own stories, their own emotional and linguistic grammar. They were real.

My own reality was centered at Union and my ongoing dialogues with Jim Washington and Jim Forbes. These brothers helped me more than I can say. What a joy to be surrounded by friends who were not only intellectuals of astounding depth, but men who viewed theological and political systems with such critical acumen. On top of that, they were ministers who preached the gospel every Sunday! I loved them both more than words can express. I thank God that my own Christianity, challenged again and again by philosophies that rejected its tenets, was strengthened by my proximity to Wash and Jim who, in their very beings, exuded the love ethos of the Palestinian Jew we call Lord.

“H
OW
’
S IT GOING, BRO
?”
Cliff was calling from California. It was October 1980.

“The Union gig is going great,” I said. “I’m picking up a parttime teaching thing at Yale. Just trying to stay strong.”

“You don’t have to try to stay strong, Corn. You
are
strong.”

“Had a date with a woman you need to meet. She’s magnificent, man. Just magnificent.”

“What’s her name, Corn?”

“Ramona Santiago.”

“Is that the Puerto Rican sister you told me that every man at Union has been trying to get next to? The one who heads up the personnel office?”

“The very same.”

“She’s quite a bit older than you, isn’t she?”

“She’s forty-one, Cliff.”

“And you’re twenty-seven.”

“And she has a son,” I said. “I hope to meet him soon.” “She’s a beautiful person,” I continued, “inside and out. Took her to see
A Chorus Line
on Broadway. We both had a ball”

“You see this as a serious situation?”

“She’s a serious woman, Cliff, with a seriously wonderful outlook on life. I’m feeling this very strongly.”

“Well, keep me posted, Corn.”

“I always do. I always will.”

Ramona lived in the Bronx. She was a believing Catholic. I was believing in her and she was believing in me. I started going to mass with her every Sunday. Wasn’t that I was fixing to leave my Baptist stronghold and embrace the papacy. But I’m the kind of Negro who can worship in a lot of settings and still feel the presence of God. I was happy to accompany her to church. I was happy to be in Ramona’s exquisite presence.

Ramona not only possessed extraordinary physical beauty but a sweetness that was out of this world. She spoke with a lilting Puerto Rican accent and had the kind of personality that put everyone at ease. She put me at ease. On the dance floor, she floated like a dream. We went to the clubs and danced the night away. We enjoyed a compatibility that was entirely free of stress. She spoke of fulfilling her ambition of becoming a first-grade teacher, and I supported her in that effort.