Brother West (16 page)

After our courtship continued for another six months, I called back Cliff.

“I think this is it,” I said. “Ramona is amazing. I see spending the rest of my life with her.”

“Sounds great, bro. As long as you’re happy.”

“Happier than I’ve ever been.”

“You’re going to propose?”

“I am.”

“And you think she’ll accept?”

“If I’m lucky.”

I was lucky. And everyone at Union knew I was lucky. Everyone who knew Ramona knew I was lucky. This woman was an absolute blessing in my life. Her level of heart, soul, mind, and style put her in a category all her own. We were married by Jim Forbes in the small Union chapel on May 31, 1981. Brother Wash and Brother Cliff were my best men.

During our honeymoon—walking hand-in-hand across the historic plazas of Mexico City, marveling at the mighty revolutionary murals of Diego Rivera and the beautifully painful self-portraits of Frida Kahlo, exploring the charms of Acapulco, Taxco, and Guadalajara—I kept hearing the Ohio Players singing in my ear, “Heaven must be like this.” That week in Mexico with Ramona was among the most glorious of my life.

Back in New York, we settled down in the Bronx. Ramona was devoted to the Bronx. She was also devoted to her son Nelson. Nelson and I were close. When he started facing some extreme challenges, my family in Sacramento—especially Cliff and Dad— volunteered to help. Nelson moved out there and actually lived in my parents’ house until his life was straightened out.

Our life went on. My teaching reached a new level of intensity. At one point, I was conducting courses at Union, Yale, Haverford, and Williams. I was burning up the highways—New York to New Haven, the suburbs of Philly to the woods of western Massachusetts—racing from gig to gig. I welcomed the work, not only because I was finally learning to lecture in a free-form manner that both suited me and seemed authentic. I was seeing that my peculiar style, born in the black slices of Sacramento and the Shiloh Baptist Church, was working well with the students I was determined to reach. My classes were in demand. My life was in order. Or so I thought.

TRANE

A
S A BOY,
I
LOVED THE MUSIC
of my church and the music of my neighborhood. That meant gospel and rhythm-and-blues. Early on, I could feel how the genres related to one another. Underneath their infectious rhythms was the heartbeat of hope. The music was about getting up and getting on with the business before us. The songs moved us from fear to faith. Whether it was Andráe Crouch singing “The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power” or Curtis Mayfield singing “Keep on Pushing,” a sense of relentless hope informed the body of African American popular music that came into my life at a very early age and remained as a daily provider of sane tranquility.

As a student of African American history, I had read about jazz. I had an understanding of its various periods and knowledge of its virtuosic innovators. I knew about its development from New Orleans to Chicago, down to the territorial bands of Oklahoma and Texas, and up to Fifty-second Street, where bebop blossomed. I heard jazz and appreciated jazz, but jazz never possessed my soul as strongly as gospel or R&B.

Until John Coltrane came along and blew off the top of my head.

I was an infant in the ’50s when Coltrane was playing with Miles. I was kid in the ’60s when he was breaking through one artistic barrier after another. When Trane died in July 1967, I was still in junior high. That year, though, I was busy listening to Aretha singing “Respect” and Martha and the Vandellas singing “Jimmy Mack.” That was the year of Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her.”

Fifteen years later, though, I was approaching thirty. I had been married once and was now married again. I was convinced that, in Ramona, I had found the woman with whom I would live forever and a day. In my multitasking, multiteaching, peripatetic role as bluesman/teacher, I was gaining some traction. I’d thrown away my notes and found improvisation to be my most natural and effective style.

My lecturing style is often viewed as akin to preaching, yet I carefully distinguish between a passion to communicate that unsettles and unhouses, as opposed to a religious proclamation of good news. There is no doubt my rhetorical style is influenced by black preaching but the substance of what I have to say is thoroughly Socratic, prophetic, tragicomic, and democratic. I aspire to a level of intellectual and soulful presentation that sounds like the blues and jazz, if they could talk.

I
WAS DIGGING DANCE MUSIC
—in fact, digging it harder than ever in the pre-disco/disco/post-disco eras—when Earth, Wind & Fire said, “Sing a Song,” Dazz Band said, “Let It Whip,” and Evelyn “Champagne” King was talking about “Love Come Down.”

And then here comes John Coltrane. Here comes Coltrane on the dozens of records he cut on the Prestige and Blue Note labels. Here comes Coltrane playing with Miles Davis on the “Kind of Blue” album. Here comes Coltrane when he jumps over to the Atlantic label to do
Coltrane Jazz
and
Giant Steps
and
My Favorite Things
. Here comes Coltrane when he switches to Impulse and releases
Live at the Village Vanguard
and
Africa Brass
. Here comes Coltrane with his partners, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones. Here he comes doing a duet album with Duke Ellington, and then another with jazz vocalist Johnny Hartman, perhaps the most romantic album in the long and tortured history of human romance.

I had to catch up with these albums. And in the early’80s that’s just what I did. For reasons I’m not sure I can isolate, at this point in my life John Coltrane pierced my heart. I heard his cry. His voice took root somewhere deep inside me, and I found myself listening to every Coltrane record, reading every article and book pertaining to Coltrane, studying the man’s style and deriving from it a sense of strength that pushed me forward. He did not define his spirituality, as I did, in terms of Jesus Christ or Christian faith. But that didn’t matter because his artistic muse—what he called “A Love Supreme”—had us walking down parallel paths. He led me to that same place as the preaching of my childhood minister, the Reverend Willie P. Cooke. His vocabulary was different, but his sonic attitude—now joyful, now mournful, now playful, now serious—was similar. You can’t listen to Trane and not feel the tragic dimension of the stories he tells. “Alabama,” for instance, the composition he wrote to memorialize the four young precious black girls killed in the September 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, ranks alongside the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose poetic cadences had such a deep influence on this jazz musician. Like Shakespeare or Chekhov, Trane’s work gave a narrative rhythm to our human tragicomic condition. Just as the playwrights turned that condition into drama, he turned it into sound.

Coltrane riffed in a setting of onrushing rhythm that seemed to reflect my own rhythms. One of the unforgettable moments of my life was meeting his beloved wife Alice, who invited me to speak at her concert in Newark, where she called me “a warrior of love” in the tradition of her husband. “I listen to the beautiful music of Trane,” I said, “alongside my favorite string quartet— Beethoven’s Opus 131.”

Another inspiring moment came in Coltrane’s stomping grounds, Philadelphia, when Steve Rowland approached me after I had lectured. Steve is not only one of the most outstanding Trane experts alive, but the coproducer, along with Larry Abrams, of the best thing ever done on the jazz giant, a radio series called “Tell Me How Long Trane’s Been Gone.”

“Brother West,” Steve said “you remind me more of Trane than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I replied. “That’s the highest compliment I could ever be paid.”

Meanwhile, I was moving fast. I had to move fast. I had to hold down these three teaching jobs to feed the wolf that turned up at the door every month. Hilda was down there in Atlanta with Cliff, and they had their needs. Ramona had gone back to school to get her teaching degree. I needed to stay on it.

W
ILLIAMS
C
OLLEGE WAS A WONDERFUL
intellectual experience. God put me in the right place at the right time because it was at Williams where I met and befriended two of the giants of the humanities: the august E.H. Gombrich, author of the classic
The Story of Art
, and the distinguished historian Geoffrey Barraclough. I was also part of a high-powered seminar on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida led by Brother Mark Taylor. The highlight of my time at Williams was meeting my dear brother Professor David L. Smith and his lovely wife Vivian.

But even in this stratospheric atmosphere, I was a black man in America. Dig this:

One day, driving to Williams from New York, I was somewhere around Albany when the police stopped me. Figured I was speeding. I figured wrong.

“Get out the car, boy.”

Here we go
.

Policeman looked over my driver’s license, looked me in the face, and then nodded his head.

“Yup,” he said. “You’re the guy.”

“What guy?”

“Nigger we been looking for.”

“For doing what?”

“Selling cocaine.”

“I don’t sell cocaine.”

“What do you do?”

“Teach philosophy and religion at Williams.”

“And I’m The Flying Nun.”

“I’m a professor,” I reiterated.

“You’ve been snorting up your own merchandise. We got you down as a major dealer.”

“Impossible.”

“That’s what they all say.”

We went down to the station where the officer was convinced he’d made a major arrest.

“You can call your lawyer,” he said.

“Don’t need to. Just call my dean at Williams. Here’s his number. He’ll set you straight.”

The dean was outraged. He read them the riot act, and they immediately let me go, even if they did forget to apologize.

When arrested, threatened, or persecuted, I give myself permission to be full of righteous indignation and moral outrage but I try to never allow righteous indignation to degenerate into bitter revenge, or let moral outrage become hateful anger. My blues sensibility or tragic-comic disposition leads me to juxtapose the sheer absurdity of the situation with the utmost seriousness of the injustice. So I retain a painful smile on my face even as I respond to the undeniable hurt with intense ethical energy.

I
LIKE MOVING IN FIVE
different directions at the same time. It seems to suit my style, or maybe it just
is
my style. In any event, it’s how I’m still living my life. Back in these early teaching years, shuttling back and forth between a quartet of colleges, the notion of settling down with one gig never really entered my mind until I got a call from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. They offered me a professorship with tenure. To this wandering Negro, tenure was a big deal. Tenure meant no more multitasking overtime hustling. Tenure meant security for life.

“What do you think, baby?” I asked Ramona.

“I couldn’t leave the Bronx, Corn,” she said. “I’ve never lived anywhere but the Bronx.”

“Nashville is nice, baby. Nice countryside, nice people.”

“Don’t know anyone there.”

“We’ll make new friends.”

“My friends are in the Bronx, Corn. My life is in the Bronx. If you wanna go, I understand. But this is home, honey.”

I turned down the offer with major reservations. I turned it down because I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my marriage. I have to thank Ramona for influencing me to turn it down. In that regard, she saved my life. Had I gone, I would never have been happy. I didn’t quite know it then, but I needed the stimulation of the East Coast and all its cultural fervor. Outside of that environment, I might well have withered away.

When I met Ramona, she hadn’t finished college. Her graduation, on my thirtieth birthday, was cause for celebration. She adored children, and her lifelong dream of teaching first grade was coming true. A New York City school in Washington Heights, where the students were primarily Dominican, hired her. I’d drive over there every afternoon to pick her up, and she positively glowed with the love of her work.

Ramona’s career had taken a happy turn. My career was moving along at a good pace. Things should have been good between us. And for a while they were. Underneath, though, there was an undercurrent of discord. Our lives were very separate. There was her Bronx, her school, her students. Then there were my universities, my intellectual pursuits, my work. I remember once when my mother came to New York. I was giving a public lecture and Mom was getting dressed to attend.

“Aren’t you coming along?” Mom asked Ramona.

“Oh, no, Mama West,” my wife said. “I don’t go to those sort of things.”

“Well, you should, honey. You’ll be proud of the way your husband speaks in public.”

“I am proud, but I’m not sure I’d understand what he was talking about,” Ramona said.

“Sure you would,” Mom reassured her.

Ramona conceded, got dressed, and joined Mom. Later my mother reported my wife’s reaction.

“It was strange, son,” said Mom, “but she said that she didn’t recognize you. She didn’t recognize the man up there who was standing before the audience and delivering a lecture. She said that was a Cornel she never knew.”