Brother West (21 page)

I’ll never forget the warm welcome given me by my good friend Michael Walzer at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He regularly asked me to lunch and to spirited seminars with outstanding figures like Clifford Geertz and Albert Hirschman. Walzer also invited me to serve on the board and write for
Dissent
, the famous democratic socialist journal founded by the renowned New York intellectual Irving Howe. Walzer was the nemesis of Edward Said. Yet both remained my good friends.

In a personal sense, my intense professional activity at Princeton also became a distraction from the distress I felt from Elleni’s situation. She was in Tampa, and the idea of us being together, a long-held dream of mine, seemed to be on permanent hold.

There was much to do at Princeton. Naturally I had to attend to the curriculum, the faculty, and a wealth of administrative issues. I was much aided by the marvelous manager of the African American program, Dr. Gayle Pemberton. The lovely Hattie Black and the supportive Comfort Sparks made my job a joy. I was determined that my first act would be to honor two of the men who led the way in Afro-American studies: Harold Cruse and St. Clair Drake.

Cruse was a courageous thinker, writer, and teacher who, along with Amiri Baraka—then known as LeRoi Jones—had founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem. His masterwork,
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
, published in the ’60s, had a profound influence on generations to follow, though my favorite of his is
Rebellion or Revolution.
He began teaching at the University of Michigan and was a principal architect of their Afro-American and African Studies Department. The man was far ahead of the curve. In fact, he helped design the curve. Most astoundingly, he held a high position at the University of Michigan until he retired in the’80s—yet he had never graduated from college. He didn’t have to. His intellectual creativity excelled the vast majority of those holding degrees. No doubt about it, I wanted to honor Harold Cruse.

When I first met St. Clair Drake through my high school partner Glenn Jordan after my first year at Harvard, the man impressed me mightily. Early on, he had set up Stanford’s African American Studies. In doing so, he faced powerful forces that argued against his approach, but by virtue of his commitment, scholarship, and pure tenacity, he prevailed. I respected Professor Drake and wanted to bring him to Princeton, where we could applaud him for his grand achievements.

Finally, with the considerable prestige of Princeton behind me, I had the wherewithal to publicly recognize black thinkers who had triumphed in academia on their own terms against heavy odds.

You can imagine, then, how excited I was when St. Clair Drake was on his way from California to accept this honor from Princeton. I drove up to Newark Airport to pick him up in my shiny new, pitch-black 1988 Cadillac Sedan DeVille. (By the way, I’m glad to report that twenty years later I’m still driving that car. I still consider it the coldest ride on the road. Dad had bought his first Cadillac in 1962. Seeing how happy it made him, I always wanted a Cadillac of my own.)

I was at the gate when Dr. Drake’s plane landed. Next thing I know, they’re carrying out a man on a stretcher. It was St. Clair Drake. He had a stroke during the flight, and suddenly I found myself following an ambulance to the hospital. The stroke was severe, and for four days and nights I stayed by his side. I slept at the foot of his bed, hoping that my presence might offer him some comfort. Through an act of friendship that I’ll explain in a minute, I had the majestic Kathleen Battle come and sing to him at his bedside.

His recovery was only partial—he died some two years later— and we had no choice but to give him his award in the hospital room.

This turn of events deeply touched my heart. I was reaching back to a man who had reached out to me when I was a college kid looking for direction. He was what I wanted to be—a broadly engaged thinker whose sense of the academy rejected traditional restrictions and offered a vision that was generous and expansive. His stroke brought home the fact that it was up to my generation to insure that his legacy lives on.

I have tried. I have not always succeeded, but I have never lost sight of the trail blazed by brave pioneers like St. Clair Drake and Harold Cruse.

I
T WAS ALSO MY PRIVILEGE
to bring Professor Edward Said to Princeton, where he had studied as an undergraduate. Back when I was teaching at Union, Edward had told me that he had been diagnosed with leukemia. Even though he was an impassioned secularist and nonbeliever, he didn’t object when three hard-core black Christians—James Washington, James Forbes, and myself— prayed for him in his apartment. His teary eyes revealed how deeply our love had touched him. He would live an amazingly productive life for the next sixteen years.

When Said, a prominent Palestinian intellectual and critic of Israeli policy, came to lecture at Princeton in the late ’80s, it was a period when I had befriended Omar Pound, the only child of the legendary poet Ezra Pound. Omar, a fine teacher of writing and free of his father’s vicious anti-Semitism, also helped me sponsor Arno J. Mayer, an iconoclastic historian whose recent book on the Holocaust had stirred controversy. Both lectures proceeded in the face of threats against all of us. At one point while Edward was speaking, someone cut off the lights and we wondered whether this was our moment of truth. Fortunately, the lights went back on and Professor Said was able to speak his truth at our beloved alma mater.

I
T WAS NOT ONLY PROGRESSIVE INTELLECTUALS
like Edward Said whom I encouraged to come to Princeton, but conservative figures as well. The most prominent of these was Rush Limbaugh.

I was in my office as director of Afro-American Studies when late one afternoon the phone rang.

“Professor West, this is Rush Limbaugh. I just want you to know that I have contacted virtually every Ivy League university in this country, requesting a debate with whomever they choose. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that I have been rejected at every turn. So it is with small hope that I make one final request. Would you, Professor, agree to a public debate?”

“Dear Brother Rush, my brother Clifton and our friend Bob back in Sacramento have been talking about you. I’d be delighted to host a serious and substantive debate with you.”

Rush seemed flabbergasted and quite interested. When scheduling conflicts prevented the debate, I was disappointed. But I also have to point out that for the next twenty-plus years, with all the attacks and assaults on leftist intellectuals, Brother Rush has never said a bad word about me. In fact, the only time he ever mentioned me on his show was—believe it or not—when he agreed with me.

“THE WAY YOU DO
THE THINGS YOU DO ”

K
ATHLEEN
B
ATTLE SANG THE FIRST LINE:
“You got a smile so bright … ”

I sang the second: “You know you could have been a candle … ”

Carly Simon sang the next line: “I’m holding you so tight … ”

Kathleen: “You know you could have been a handle … ”

Corn: “The way you swept me off my feet … ”

Carly: “You know you could have been a broom … ”

Kathleen: “The way you smell so sweet … ”

Corn: “You know you could have been some perfume.”

Carly: “Well, you could have been anything that you wanted to … ”

Kathleen: “And I can tell … ”

All: “The way you do the things you do.”

It was the summer of 1988, and we were all gathered around the grand piano at Carly Simon’s home on Martha’s Vineyard. The air was sweet and the songs were sweeter. It was a thrill to know that Kathleen, the magnificent coloratura soprano, and Carly Simon, the wonderful pop vocalist, knew the song that Smokey Robinson had written for the Temptations as well as I did. I relished the moment. By then, Kathleen and I had fallen in love.

We had met in the spring. Kathleen had given a magnificent recital at Carnegie Hall, and I was blessed to be in the audience. I was riveted, not only by the sheer beauty of her voice, but the majestic beauty of her person. As best I recall, she sang Handel and Mozart. My head swam with melody, my spirit excited by the emotional power and delicacy of her interpretations. I was transported. I saw her standing there—a statuesque woman of rare delicacy and unquestioned dignity, a brown angel.

Mutual friends introduced us after the recital. That evening we had a late dinner. We had instant rapport. She had grown up in the black church; her roots were gospel. In fact, she would later invite me to speak at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Portsmouth, Ohio, the sanctuary where she had sung as a child and where her family still worshipped. That was a singular thrill.

We had worlds in common—not only our passion for classical music, but rhythm-and-blues and Broadway as well. Kathleen had an easy laugh and beautiful outlook on life. She was bright, curious, and sophisticated in a way I never would be. Because she was constantly traveling the world, she had firsthand familiarity with political and social issues of countries from all over the globe. Her facility with foreign languages was amazing and her understanding of foreign cultures deep and compassionate.

I also loved her self-confidence. I saw in Kathleen a free black woman who maintained her sense of strong identity no matter the circumstance. She is unquestionably a diva in the best sense of that term, but I never saw any arrogance in her bearing, only a self-assuredness that had been earned over an illustrious career and was expressed with grace and charm.

Our initial dinner led to a second, and then a third. I then began traveling with her as she performed in Ann Arbor, Pittsburgh, Boston, Washington, D.C., and other cities. Every second or third night, I was treated to still another Kathleen Battle recital. When they called me “Mr. Battle,” I smiled. Couldn’t have cared less. I was there to carry her bags, and happy to do so. Honored to do so. To others, she was a radiant star. To me, she was a sugarsweet down-home sister. We brought out the best in each other. One night she was singing in
The Barber of Seville
. The next night Luciano Pavarotti would cook us a gourmet meal.

At the end of her American tour, she was off to Europe for the rest of the summer. “I’ll see you after the Salzburg Festival, Cornel,” she said.

But I wanted to see Kathleen and I wanted to see Salzburg, so as a surprise I showed up for her fortieth birthday in Austria. Her performance was sublime and our time in the mansion of Herbert von Karajan was beyond this world.

Back home, I invited her to Princeton, where she heard me lecture and sat in on several classes. I introduced Kathleen to Toni Morrison and suggested that they collaborate. They did, and the magnificent result is
Honey and Rue
, lyrics by Toni, music by André Previn. It’s an original song cycle connected to the African American experience. It was released on record and debuted at Carnegie Hall.

In New York, Roberta Flack invited us to her apartment at the Dakota, where we stood around the grand piano and sang Supremes songs. Kathleen also took me to Carnegie Hall to see what would be Maestro Herbert von Karajan’s last performance. By then he had become my friend and invited me to stand in the wings to watch him conduct Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. By the time he put down the baton, he was so depleted that he couldn’t walk. I carried him off the stage.

Kathleen and I built up memories to last a lifetime. She introduced me to the opera legend Jessye Norman, whom I then introduced to Toni Morrison. I shall never forget Jessye’s first words to Toni: “Ms. Morrison, all my life I’ve wanted to be you and like you.”

“And all my life, Jessye,” Toni replied, “I’ve wanted to be you and like you.”

Kathleen also introduced me to two fabulous maestros: the inimitable James Levine—her mentor from Cincinnati, Ohio— and the famous conductor Christoph von Dohnányi. Dohnányi and I spoke late into the night about the life and death of his godfather, the uncompromising German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer. When Bonhoeffer, who had once joined a plot to kill Hitler, came to study at Union Theological Seminary, he regularly attended services at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. The German spiritual radical testified that it was the rich black church worship that enabled him to feel the full joy of Jesus.

No doubt, Kathleen and I had a powerful and abiding love for one another. We longed to be together all the time. But we also couldn’t deny the reality of our different lives and different obligations. We were on different paths moving in different directions. It became increasingly difficult for me to get away. Same for Kathleen. The pull of our professions was strong. And that pull, of course, wasn’t fueled by a sense of mere obligation—it was pulled by passion. Kathleen had to sing. I had to teach. We had to go our separate ways. And yet we remained connected—and still do—by mutual respect and powerful love.

A
S THE
’80
S SPILLED INTO THE
’90s,
I began a series of dialogues with the wonderful bell hooks who, I said, “writes with a deep sense of urgency about the existential and psycho-cultural dimensions of African American life—especially those spiritual and intimate issues of love, hurt, pain, envy, and desire usually probed by artists.” The result of our in-depth conversations was a book we coauthored, named
Breakin’ Bread
, a title that refers to friends chatting over a good meal as well as the delicious song by Fred Wesley—called “Breakin’ Bread,” of course—that has to do with a critical recovery and revision of one’s past. We lectured together all over the country on this book. We had worked together at Yale and had danced together in clubs like Brick ’n’ Wood in New Haven in the early ’80s.

bell and I spoke about a wide expanse of subjects. Thinking about my new position at Princeton, I said, “Afro-American studies was never meant to be solely for Afro-Americans. It was meant to try to redefine what it means to be human, what it means to be modern, what it means to be American, because people of African descent in this country are profoundly human, profoundly modern, profoundly American.”