Brother West (26 page)
A
NOTHER SIGNIFICANT RELATIONSHIP WAS STRAINED
when I refused to support Bill Clinton for his second term. Back in 1992, I traveled the country speaking for him. I liked the man, and saw him as open-minded to new and progressive ideas. Naturally I was gratified when Clinton invited me to the White House and spoke highly of my books. But my outrage at his welfare bill—and the unconscionable crime bill—kept me from supporting him. In my view, Clinton was using the poor as a political football to win the 1996 election against Bob Dole. This bill, deeply damaging to the disenfranchised, was the president’s way of stealing thunder from the Republican Right. This was a bill so heartless that even Ronald Reagan would have refused to sign it. Reagan had concerns about job training; he also had concerns about what would happen to impoverished children after the time limits for support ran out. Clinton ignored these concerns. He ignored what would happen if the supportive networks for those in need were abandoned.
I was also sickened when I saw that at the signing ceremony Clinton had a black woman standing right next to him. He needed the symbol of the “Welfare Queen” to approve his action. Without that symbol, the president couldn’t justify signing a major piece of legislation that denied the most vulnerable members of our society: poor children. The historical subtext, of course, is that black women were the only females forced to work the fields during 244 years of slavery. When slavery was over, they were moved into white households to help raise white children. Yet they symbolize lazy people in America?
Clinton’s approach to the nation’s poor echoed Rudolph Giuliani’s approach to New York City’s poor. Giuliani proudly pointed to the deodorized and sanitized Times Square. No more homeless, no more funk, no more guys running up to your car to clean your windshield for change. But what happened to the squeegee folk?
For all Giuliani cared, they could have been dumped into the Hudson River. They could have been deported to Jersey City and Newark, falling into lives of crime and committing felonies left and right. But that didn’t matter as long as our bourgeois tourism trade prospered. As long as the visitors from Sydney or Tokyo feel safe in the city, who cares about the squeegee folk?
The squeegee folk, the impoverished folks in the ghetto, people without means or hope—those who, as Ray Charles said, “Ain’t got nothing yet”—these were the human souls that Clinton’s welfare bill coldly and cruelly neglected.
The cultural equivalent of the elimination of the squeegee folk was the eradication of the arts program in inner-city schools. It was Carol Proctor who introduced me to my dear sister Natalie Lieberman, a compassionate and generous New Yorker, who founded the Learning Through Art Program to speak to this void. When I was asked to serve on the board of the Guggenheim Museum, I agreed with the stipulation that their foundation contribute to Mrs. Lieberman’s program. Ironically, it was during this period when poor people were under fierce assault that the Guggenheim gave its first exhibition of African art. I was honored to support the show and write the introduction to the catalogue. And I was also delighted to provide the Black Radical Congress—the major leftist black organization in this period to defend poor people— with $10,000 as the seed money for its founding.
Meanwhile, Clinton, despite his concrete neglect of poor people, was reelected. I spoke at the inauguration for his second term and was invited back to the White House to discuss a range of issues. The president joked about my non-support and was good-natured about the fact that I had been highly critical of what I considered his abandonment of the poor. We could still talk to each other, still learn from each other, still remain friends. But none of that diminished my conviction that, on one of the most critical issues of our time, Bill Clinton blew it—and blew it bad.
I
N THIS MEMOIR
, I
MUST
mark the loss of my dear, dear friend James Melvin Washington. I must declare my love for this man and everything that he represents. I must publicly mourn my precious brother. In another era and in a far different context, W.H. Auden mourned the death of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats with these lines:
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
Jim Washington taught us all how to praise. Perhaps his most enduring legacy is his monumental
Conversations with God: Two Centuries of Prayers by African Americans.
Jim left us with our people’s most beautiful praise. In the introduction to the book, he writes, “African-American prayers, a literary genre and a religious social practice, assume that God is just and loving, and that the human dilemma is that we cannot always experience and see God’s justice and love. We pray for faith to trust God’s ultimate disclosure. Thus prayer as act and utterance teaches the believer to exercise what Adrienne Rich calls ‘revolutionary patience.’ But the literary history of African-American prayers suggests that, besides anticipating God’s ultimate self-disclosure in the history of the oppressed, we are the trustees of a spiritual legacy paid for with the blood, sweat, tears, and dreams of a noble, even if not triumphant, people. The culture, grammar, and promise of the African-American prayer tradition are in our hands. Only time will tell whether or not their faith in us was worth the price they paid.”
He includes this prayer from 1902 by Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman:
Oh, God, when days were dark indeed
When we were fast in Slavery’s chain
Thou then our parents’ prayers did heed
And helped us freedom to obtain
And this “Pagan Prayer” by Countee Cullen, written in 1925:
Not for myself I make this prayer
But for this race of mine
That stretches forth from shadowed places
Dark hands for bread and wine.
For me, my heart is pagan made,
My feet are never still
But give them hearts to keep them warm
In homes high on a hill…
Our Father, God; our Brother, Christ
Or are we bastard kin,
That to our plaints your ears are closed,
Your doors barred from within?
Our Father, God; our Brother, Christ,
Retrieve my race again;
So shall you compass this black sheep,
This pagan heart. Amen
.
There is Dr. King’s “A Pastoral Prayer” from 1956 in which he says, “We thank thee, O God, for the spiritual nature of man. We are in nature but we live above nature. Help us never to let anybody or any condition pull us so low as to cause us to hate. Give us strength to love our enemies and to do good to those who spitefully use us and persecute us.”
Jim’s book of prayers, a gift both from his people and to his people, became a bestseller and a permanent part of the African American library. It’s a living tribute to his faith. When he died of a stroke in 1997, he had just turned forty-nine. His other books—
A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr
.,
I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World
and
Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Baptist Quest for Social Power
—all carry the strength of spirit and the purposefulness of scholarship.
Jim asked the deepest questions we can ask: Why evil? Why oppression? Why the absurdity of human existence? He didn’t offer easy answers. Jim was never glib. He let the weight of those questions sit on the shoulders of those who asked them. He knew the questions wouldn’t go away; not then, not now, not ever. What he did do, though, was to live his life with a spiritual vigor—a kindness, a gentleness, a radiant love—that had you looking for the source of his strength.
If you looked closely, you saw Jesus Christ in Jim’s eyes. If you listened closely, you heard Jesus Christ in Jim’s voice. James Melvin Washington argued for the reality of God by not arguing at all. He proved the existence of the Prince of Peace through the exquisite peace that you felt in his very presence. Such peace lives forever.
Shortly after his passing, it was a blessing to be able to dedicate my book
Restoring Hope
to Jim. It was collection of conversations held at the historic Schomburg Center in Harlem headed by my dear brother Howard Dodson. I also coedited, with Quinton Hosford Dixie, a group of essays in honor of Brother Wash,
The Courage to Hope
.
Faith, hope, and love—the Christian virtues—were what Brother Wash was all about.
L
IKE
J
OHN
C
OLTRANE AND
J
OHN
K
EATS
,
Marvin Gaye understood the tragicomic condition of human existence. Marvin was adored by women, yet his relationships with women were troubled. In typical autobiographical mode, he wrote the music to the film
Trouble Man
. Maintaining that same sense of candid self-revelation, in 1973 he recorded a song entitled “Just to Keep You Satisfied” and placed it at the end of
Let’s Get It On
, his erotic follow-up to
What’s Going On
“Just to Keep You Satisfied” is not a typical love song. It is essentially free-form storytelling. There is no verse, chorus, or bridge. There’s only the tormented tale of Marvin’s marriage to his first wife, Anna Gordy Gaye. It is, in fact, an indication that the marriage has failed and anticipates another Marvin masterpiece that will come five years later,
Here, My Dear
, the complete delineation of that complex relationship and its bittersweet conclusion.
I cite Marvin because there are times when singers and songs say things about our lives that we can’t. Back in high school, it was common for the folk to put on a love song—say, Smokey’s “Ooh Baby Baby” and tell his honey, “Darling, this is how I feel about you.” In short, the song says it better. In that spirit, Marvin’s “Just to Keep You Satisfied” brings to mind my complex relationship with Elleni and its unfortunate demise. The lyrics are by no means a literal description of our situation, but the spirit—the pathos, the regret, the sense of defeat—are all emotions to which I relate.
You were my wife, my life, my hopes and dreams
For you to understand what this means
I shall explain...
My one desire was to love you
And think of you with pride
And keep you satisfied…
Farewell, my darling, maybe we’ll meet down the line
It’s too late for you and me, much too late for you and I…
We tried, God knows we tried…
Marvin’s anguish is palpable. There is in his voice the terrible recognition that the dream of domestic tranquility has ended in what can only be called failure. Listening to the song I keep hearing those words of Samuel Beckett: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
“W
HY DO YOU THINK IT
’
S FAILING
?”
Cliff asked me, referring to my marriage to Elleni. “It began so beautifully.”
“She’s still beautiful,” I said. “She’ll always be beautiful. Beautiful heart. Beautiful soul. Beautiful mind. She’s also grown beautifully as an aware human being in the years that I’ve known her. She’s taken up the AIDS cause in Africa and assuming a leadership position that’s truly impressive. Man, she’s just an impressive woman.”
“I know, Corn,” said Cliff. “We all love her. Mom loves her like a daughter.”
“Mom also saw what was happening. Last time Mom was here, she was talking to Elleni about my work. She asked Elleni whether she’d watched me on C-SPAN the week before. ‘Oh no,’ Elleni said. ‘I don’t always watch Corn when he’s on TV.’”
In talking to Cliff, I realized that my initial reaction to Elleni’s disinterest in my work was happiness. I was happy that she was not emotionally invested in my career. That meant she loved
me
, rather than the public person I’d become. I found that gratifying and reassuring. But then here comes the pull between the personal and professional. Here comes the pull between the passion, as Marvin put it, “to keep you satisfied,” and the passion to satisfy those unrelenting demands of the bluesman’s mission to keep singing his blues whenever and wherever he can.
“Here’s the problem,” said Cliff. “You love her too much to stay. You love her so much you gotta leave. The more successful you become, the less she sees herself as being part of you. It’s not that she’s jealous of your success. She loves your success. But paradoxically, the better you do, the worse she feels. That’s been the pattern with all your women. The truth, bro, is that everything comes second to your calling. You have so much multifaceted love and energy that the affirmation you bring your partner is off the scale. That’s your genuine gift. But sooner or later, the calling will have its due. Your sweet is so sweet that it only makes it that much more painful for the partner when the calling comes a-calling.”
Years later, my dear brother Tavis Smiley put it like this: “When you talk to students, or even to strangers, you make them feel good about themselves. You listen to their points of view, and even if you disagree, you give them the courtesy of considering whatever they say. They go away from those encounters feeling like, ‘
Good Lord, Cornel West has listened to me and validated that I’ve got something to say!’
Those encounters are beautiful, and they’re empowering for the people who interact with you. But, in character, they are diametrically opposed to the long-term relationships you’ve had with women. Those women could never quite figure out where they fit into your life. How does a mate deal with someone like you? In order to do so, they have to be unbelievably confident about their own place in the world—and their place in
your
world. Without that confidence, they can’t help but feel less-than. It deepens their insecurities. And when you sense that feeling coming over them, to protect them—in fact, to save them—you leave. You see that, in order to grow—for you to grow
and
for them to grow—you need to get out of the way.”