Makeda (9 page)
Early in my second year, I began doing extra reading in an effort to understand the various and confusing political chemistries of Washington. This business of
left
and
right
was a new and disturbing discovery that was starkly antithetical to how I had been taught for the short nineteen years of my life to view the world. The Negroes I knew measured the arrangements and equities of society in vertical terms: right over wrong; justice over injustice; freedom over oppression; fairness over unfairness; comfort over pain. For Negroes, life and politics were not board games that could be played laterally—for the sheer fun of playing them, or for simple ambition’s sake, without risk of mortal consequence. As I read on, it increasingly seemed to me that white people played their game—the left-right sport—with other people’s lives and other people’s fundamental rights. Thus, with an air of
noblesse oblige
, they could ply their rulership craft in a mannerly fashion, without risk or emotion or fear of personal injury. Yet our game was not a game at all, but rather a social struggle that was very much up-down, vertical, dangerous, and gravely unfunny.
By the age of nineteen, college had already changed me dramatically. There was a new me, and every night before falling asleep, I thanked not the college but my grandmother for getting me there.
Dr. Benjamin Quarles, the professor from whom I first heard the term “intellectual ideal,” was already an old man when I met him, his seminal study on the life and times of Frederick Douglass long behind him. But preeminent historian though he indisputably may have been, his was anything but a household name in the country’s black community. Yet he remained easily the most brilliant teacher I’d ever had. Indeed, he was recognized by his peers, black and white alike, as one of America’s most important historians. I’d never once seen him, however, on television, or read mention of him in any magazine or newspaper, not even in
Jet
. With a minimum of noise, he taught his classes at Morgan and wrote his splendid books that, I thought, scarcely disturbed the cultivated inattention of what ought to have been his natural audience. I ascribed this troubling condition to Dr. Quarles’s apparent disinterest in public notice. But Dr. Abana, a visiting professor from the University of Ghana, thought otherwise. Although he didn’t mention Dr. Quarles directly in his somewhat shocking remarks, what he said to a senior seminar class in the first few weeks of term would appear to have explained why the black community was not more broadly interested in the man. What Dr. Abana said that roiled the campus was, “The trouble with black people is that we have no insides.” This, of course, was reported in the campus newspaper out of context and made everybody mad as hell. This, before anybody even bothered to learn what Dr. Abana was talking about.
The tempest immediately served to lengthen the already yawning social distance between the school’s African and African-American students. The African students worried that Dr. Abana had offended their “hosts,” and the African-American students, who’d never taken much pain to host anyone, not to speak of the African students trying to navigate a new and indifferent culture, thought that Dr. Abana was attacking
them
in much the same way that all stripes of folks always had. What everyone seemed to overlook in the single sentence that Dr. Abana was reported to have uttered was the word
we
. Dr. Abana thought that this proved his point—a point he’d still yet to explain. “They’ve all forgotten that I said
we
have no insides. They’ve forgotten it precisely
because
we have no insides.”
Within days, Dr. Abana received a letter of support from a wealthy black alumnus and member of the school’s board of trustees who’d presented to the school a gift of a million dollars during the spring term a year before. At the commencement exercises that followed the gift by twenty-six days, the school’s president had lavished what appeared to be fawning praise upon a white
Wall Street Journal
editor who was there for unspecified reasons to accept an honorary degree, but said nothing that anyone could remember about the black alumnus sitting beside the editor, who had just given the president a check for a million dollars. No doubt influenced by this experience, the black alumnus/trustee/philanthropist wrote to Dr. Abana:
If you
meant what I think you meant, I support you one hundred percent. Black people
don’t
have any insides
.
In the ensuing issue of the school paper, it was reported that Dr. Abana had also said during the same lecture to the same seminar class that “black people are, by and large, highly suggestible. This condition results from our having no insides.”
The following day, the Black Student Union, a “union” made up solely of African-American students, picketed Dr. Abana’s ten o’clock class. No students enrolled in any of the three courses he taught, however, were among those doing the picketing.
It was clear enough that Dr. Abana had not gone out of his way to cultivate alliances during the year he spent at Morgan, having once described much of the faculty (and, pointedly, the president) as the “all too practical intellectual heirs to the lost (as in mindless) tribe of personal convenience seekers,” a view to which Dr. Quarles subscribed, albeit not publicly.
In the African scholarly world, Dr. Abana had been thought of by several well-known authorities as something of an intellectual misanthrope among a handful of black writers who wandered large and lonely in the wide, unpopulated space between the current conformist practitioners of convenience and the pioneers of the angry new rhetorical coarseness, who Dr. Abana thought informed more by emotion than information. “Good-hearted, wellintended desperados,” he called them in one particularly powerful lecture that was recorded and transcribed by one of his students.
“Self-rescue squads in loud speeding vehicles. The information—the books, the ledgers, cultures, customs, languages, religious rituals in which black people’s
memories
were stored—all systematically incinerated by the white world over the 246-year course of slavery in the Americas. Virtually the entire recorded story of who they were. Gone! Our
insides.
The insides that the people around here do not even know have gone missing long long since.
Tabula rasa
in academic regalia. Idiots. Though many are very nice, which makes it all the worse. More depressing to regard than the lot of the unlettered black underclass. At least they are more nearly aware of what slavery has cost them.
“In many ways figurative, the black race now breathes and functions worldwide in a dire postapocalyptic psychosocial condition. We are joined only by our common pathology. The damage is more spiritual than physical. More interior than exterior. Centuries of enslavement, segregation, discrimination, family deconstruction, rape, and slaughter—all tools of extreme social coercion—have taken an incalculable toll on us. The word
coercion
, you know, is from the Latin, meaning to shut in—to close off—in much the way that we all have been closed off, closed off from each other and closed off from ourselves. Closed off in the ageless night of our stolen memories—memories that once served as our spiritual insides.
“We simply cannot remember what we need to remember, what we need to remember to sustain us in self-appreciation, what we need to remember not only with our finite living minds, but in the social glands of our habits and cultures.”
Then Dr. Abana slowly raised the large prow of a brow creased with thought and looked directly at each of the nine students in the small seminar. They seemed to have been listening on a rope.
“No people can flourish without a recalled past.” He paused and made a gesture that suggested the realization that his life and lectures were exercises in futility. He drew a long breath and continued tiredly, “I don’t care about what you become. I care about what you
do
. Not with your bodies to be insinuated upwardly and uselessly into ever more expensive manufactures. I care about what you do with your minds.” Then he shouted. “Think! Think! Think us out of our small imaginations! Think us out of the darkness of our estrangement from ourselves and each other! Think us above the moment and its frivolous nonsustaining sweets! Think us above the small circumscribed plane of our short mortal lives to a place from which to see once again the black ancients who’ve something important to tell us still! Think us out of time’s injustice! Think us home to our immortal selves!” The students heard him, if for no other reason than he was speaking very loudly.
It wasn’t that Dr. Abana wished his students to agree with him. He simply wanted them to learn to
think
, to reason their way either toward his views or away from them. The direction of reason mattered less to him than the value he placed on the discipline of reason itself. Personal freedom was not to be discovered in any particular conclusion, but rather in the ordered cognitive process of reaching one. Ideology for him marked the cessation of thought.
In his book
The Ideal African
, he’d revealed what many found to be an off-putting cynicism by arguing that decent modern African political leaders were all but impossible to sustain given what the West had done historically to Africa, and did, even still, to compromise away the smallest loyalties that prospective African leaders might incline themselves to hold for their own people.
America prefers kleptocrats
for Africa. They are more manageable
.
Privately, he held the unpublished belief that virtually
all
leaders—the rich, the poor, the black, the white, the Christian, the Muslim, the Jew, the Hindu—were self-interested and self-absorbed, and for that reason he felt that democracy led to the near same result, albeit more slowly, as dictatorship. In either case corruption of purpose was inevitable.
But his main purpose was provoking black people, disgorged from whatever jerry-built cultural lifeboat they braved the tall night swells in, to search with the tools of reason for the origins and causes of their common psychological dilemma. Getting them to eschew their
outsides
in search of their missing and vastly more valuable
insides
.
Dr. Quarles, not at all flamboyant or colorful, wasn’t much for
outsides
either, and given that blacks generally hadn’t valued their
own
missing
insides
, they hadn’t bothered in critical mass numbers to value Dr. Quarles’s intellectually serious
insides
either. Dr. Abana believed that this, worldwide, was pretty much the main thing wrong with black people. After centuries of unrelenting havoc wreaked against them, he had come to believe, a large part of the problem was now
us
.
Early in Dr. Abana’s one full year spent at Morgan, Dr. Quarles, his faculty sponsor, arranged to have him address a school-wide special convocation. Students were encouraged (but not required) by the school’s administration to attend. Dr. Abana was not a famous man. Indeed, he was little known even within African-American academic circles. That he had been invited to visit at Morgan at all was more a testament to Dr. Quarles’s stature at the school than to anything the school’s leaders knew firsthand about the Ghanaian scholar whose canon of critically acclaimed writings was largely unknown to American readers.
The convocation was held in a large assembly hall on a late Monday morning so as not to conflict with scheduled classes. Twenty minutes after the program was to have begun, Dr. Quarles introduced Dr. Abana to 151 people scattered dishearteningly across the cavernous assembly hall. There were 137 students, nine faculty members and five Ghanaians living in the Baltimore area who had heard on the radio that Dr. Abana would be speaking that day. I had not planned to attend and only changed my mind after Dr. Quarles told the students in his Negro history class that we “would be well-advised to be there.”
I was a sophomore then, as were all but five of the thirty-three students taking Dr. Quarles’s course that year. The people and events that he spoke about in his lectures were those that figured large in the story of Africans in America dating from the arrival of the first enslaved man in Jamestown in August of 1619.
He was a fascinating teacher who gave a credible impression of having known his long-dead subjects personally. While I had learned the material well, I was never quite able to fully humanize (
engage
might be a better way to put it) the great American drama’s principal actors. “We’re not talking about ancient history. We’re talking about very knowable human beings and what they strove for and were caused to endure.” While the suffering was not academic, the people who bore it were, for me, sepia abstractions.
Experienced in reading the shallow maps of nineteen-year-old faces, Dr. Quarles pressed forward to link us to what was for him the very recent past: “How many of you know of Frank Lloyd Wright?” Of course we all knew that Wright, a contemporary, was the grand old man of American architecture. “Well, the Wright who lived during your very lifetimes was born just forty-two years after Thomas Jefferson died, so the period in history we are studying was not really very long ago, was it?”
I thought of the
Life Magazine
pictures taken in 1905 of the exhumed corpse of Abraham Lincoln and a boy standing graveside. The accompanying story was about the boy, now eighty, and what he remembered of the experience, seeing Lincoln there in the coffin, looking, face-mole intact, very much as he had in life.
It was at this juncture that Dr. Quarles impressed upon the class the importance of attending Dr. Abana’s lecture. “He will help you know how old you are.” He then smiled, knowing that we were not following him. “Just go, you’ll see.”
D
r. Abana was a short man, short enough to rest his folded arms flat on the surface of the lectern that hid three-quarters of his body. His uninflected voice was high-pitched, small, and raspy. It was his habit to speak with no attempt to entertain or provoke. He wore a long elaborately woven white robe and a brimless white cap that listed forward on his head halfway between the hairline and the gray-flecked mop of the brow.