A Toast to Literary Contemplation

American disputations on the black hand side.

As my readers know, I’m a big fan of jazz, an audiophile and I dig classical piano. You could call me conservative because there are just things worth conserving and genius is rare but eternal. I remember the old joke about the kid who brings his parents a C on his report card in history. He complains that there was so much less history when they were in school. Ironically we don’t give the classics their due and millions of us peasants keep hoping that AGI brings UBI. But I digress only to underline the point that there’s always greatness to be appreciated, more than one of us can ever catalog in a lifetime of edification. Thankfully we have the benefit of those who have spent a lot of time reading, watching and listening with discernment. They can point us in the right direction.

Last month while everyone was trying to draw a bead on the President brilliant or horrific first 100 days as if all of the oxygen in media depended on it, I was looking for continuity between the past and the present. Luckily, I got a chance to pop to the front of the line in Loury & McWhorter’s open Q&A. So I asked if black literature in America has that continuity.

I must admit this is something of a personally painful question, because as much as I love writing, I also felt for much of my life some generational obligation to be a great black writer. The problem is one of a matter of improvisation with respect, which one can have some creative control in working on. The other problem is that oftimes the only black people you can know are those in free markets. It’s almost impossible to get around the matter of fame in the business of cultural production and I have discovered much to my chagrin, that the most successful individuals who can do this have the sinecures of Hollywood or Academia. Success in those rarified venues provides time. Why? Without any disrespect intended, from there you can leverage the appetites of the great and power consumers of the American middle class. And I don’t have the time to be a family man and an auteur.

Actually, I thought I could do something of a Bo Jackson, be first rate in two professions. Well, maybe I did, because an injury cut Jackson’s careers in half. So I have had my own mistakes. Plus, I never really had coaches, so much as inspiration. So I am what you may call a raw, amateur talent. Thank you all, once again, for the time you take to absorb what I’m doing over here, especially now.

At any rate, here are two gentlemen whose breadth of concerns I generally share and follow, and they answered my question. So I’m off to read Percival Everett’s James, even though I’m hesitant.

Who Are Today's First-Rate Black Writers?

The Combatives
Now when it came to my own ideas about whom I wanted to write like, it might come as no surprise that I was blown away in college by no other than H. L. Mencken. Nothing quite struck me as profoundly as Mencken until I happened upon Stanley Crouch. While I became transfixed by Morrison’s facility with language, it was Crouch who was front and center in the way that Mencken was - with the nerve to criticize Spike Lee in ways no one else was bold enough to say. Here in Crouch was the clear and present example of “Writin’ is fightin’”. Whereas the wild imagination of Ishmael Reed always attempted to capture the weed-smoker in me (which didn’t really exist), Crouch was ready to talk shit without shitty thinking. I loved his hardball logic that might not be any more practical than coming to Jesus in prison, but made no excuses for those who just wanted to be hostile and anti-social. Crouch understood the criticality of the fight against half-assed thinking and straight out stupidity. This was something I could never find in the more fantastic ruminations of fairy-tale black solidarity and Hotep style or Deep South style ancestor worship.

Something is telling me that I should extend this writing to a more complete accounting of my own maturity as a writer and the influences that lead me to wherever it is that I am now. People keep telling me that my own story is worth hearing. Well, I have five more years before I retire from writing code and configuring data pipelines and then perhaps I can start behaving like my other favorite, Mark Twain. I’m sure I have at least two novels and a memoir in me, but I remain as always in that upper middle class pinch, one turntable and a microphone. I’m not even sure that I’m likable, but I’m no hanging judge. This despite the fact that my own father was one of the original Watts Poets, a few years older than his compatriot, Stanley Crouch.

If anything, I’m even bored of self-assessment. Like any artist, I imagine my progress only in relationship to my ability to eclipse my prior understanding of my work. Somebody said that excellence hits the bullseye, but genius hits the target only genius can see. Or as PeeWee Herman used to say “I meant to do that.” So I am satisfied to remain unedited and still as of yet unsponsored but by you all whose tastes must certainly intersect mine at significant crossroads. Did I say thank you?

The Contemplatives
Cornel West, whom I’ve had the occasion to meet a few times, and Henry Louis Gates Jr who I met just casually walking across the street in Cambridge were both intellectual lights I found influential. If it weren’t for them, there’s probably a level of complexity I might never have attempted to read or write outside of the likes of Knuth and Minsky. West’s American Evasion of Philosophy got me started more seriously in becoming what he called an organic intellectual. But interestingly enough, neither were so influential on me as Mishima and the Tao. So already my soul was calmed, but not my black soul. There was this distance between, as Mishima put it, the unity of pen and sword, that I found it impractical to bridge as a black American. Because black American dreams are American dreams, are revolutionary dreams. I didn’t want to be a revolutionary so much as a Daimyo in good standing with the Shogun, or at least a Samurai who had better things to do than be killing all the time. Black anger in America is a tunnel into the enervated self with no ends in light. So I liked the mellow minds of West and Gates who could lift themselves, Lorax-like above the devastated dark forest, even if their view from above was dire.

But then they both fell off. West tried to rap and glom onto Tavis Smiley’s people. Gates aimed to mix it up with a cop. I don’t know why, other than my own Grandfather’s bearing, that I think I’m all that superior of a gentleman. I guess it’s because I try to be and always did.

The Old School
So without a greenlit project or a thesis advisor, I reckoned myself homeless and adopted the dead, whose meeting would never disappoint my idolatry. My father idolized his own father, but in his dotage, Grandfather Chico only wanted to sip scotch and never write his memoirs. Of course I never got my PhD or published a paper and ink thing so Pops was a bit disappointed in that as well. So I’m off into history and have been for quite some time. I must confess in retrospect that I have always found the future and the past more compelling than the present, most certainly in terms of consuming daily news & talking points that, like Life Cereal, is supposed to be good for you. I won’t eat it. I hate everything.

So about the time I felt officially part of the professional class of America at the age of 30, the blackness I aimed to conserve was oddly missing. I was stunningly impressed by John Langston Gwaltney’s Drylongso which was one of the landmark works that helped me unload a mass of contempt for the black masses, which I had previously reckoned were in desperate need of leadership and guidance through the deadly racial hunger games of America. No longer. We were growing in population, social capital and financial wherewithal, if not wisdom and grace. My simple declaration was that ‘The Black Family persists’, even in light of Moynihan’s warning, ignored. There was and remains enough motherwit and aggro vitality amongst all, and genius amongst the few that no notion of black Americans perishing could stick in my mind. After all, all I had to do was look at my own family, and the one I aimed to assemble.

I therefore could pick and choose from the future, which took me to sci-fi and black speculative fiction, a bit of autobiography from a half dozen wits I considered my contemporaries, and the whole of Western history. There was no irony in the ease of my acceptance of the likes of Winston Churchill in consideration of my own grandfather’s bearing. But there were also fascinating visions from writers like Charles Wright, Michael Thelwell, Brent Staples, Ellis Cose, Stephen A. Carter, Charles Johnson, Paul Beatty, Greg Tate, Darryl Pinckney, and Gerald Early.

But of all the black writers I’ve ever read the one I most identified with was of the old school. Interestingly enough, I haven’t re-read it since the 90s. It was Jean Toomer’s Cane. Within that book of short stories and poetry, it was the character of Kabnis.

GPT sez:
Kabnis embodies the disconnection between the Northern Black intellectual tradition and the Southern Black folk culture. He feels intellectually superior due to his education but is emotionally and spiritually adrift. His Northern sensibilities leave him ill-equipped to handle the raw violence and racial injustice of the South.

I’ll eat that cookie. I was just talking to my sister about the hostility I felt towards filmmaker John Singleton whose portrayal of the neighborhood I grew up in ‘Boyz in the Hood’, defied my experience and my very existence in it. To utter ‘Crenshaw’ in any place in America puts one in the shoes of the desolate rootless violent struggle of Singleton’s Boyz. It wasn’t like that. For one thing, it erased the black upper class of View Park and all of the Japanese Nisei who were my friends and neighbors. I had a pivotal moment sighting Singleton across from me in an ice cream parlor on Martha’s Vineyard. I walked away without saying a word. The beef wasn’t worth it.

Being that Kabnis was my single life until my jackpot moment of marrying the Spousal Unit, moving to Atlanta, and loving my emergent fatherhood. And suddenly I became much more like the character of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sixo.

GPT sez:
Sixo is one of the few characters in Beloved who seems to have retained a sense of autonomy and dignity despite the dehumanizing conditions of slavery. He laughs when others might cry, speaks cryptically, and seems to live by his own internal code. His actions and words suggest a man who refuses to be fully dominated, either physically or mentally.

Except that I was living in the intellectual North, not the stultifying South when I read that. Yet I was fully prepared to make that particular dirt work for me and my new family. Quite frankly, I got it, but then I got bored. I needed Silicon Valley. So I moved back to California. In California I was finally liberated by none other than Russell Banks, whom I recall to be a Canadian, no blacker than my teacup. His book, Cloudsplitter was a revolution of mind. How it came to be told that John Brown was seen as a madman was a mystery revealed. In fact, John Brown’s life and the probabilities of others like him gave proof to the lie that no white man ever conceived that the African was equal in every way. I learned finally there was this man, in America. So dedicated and so consecrated. To the pain. To the death. I lived a mile’s hike from the grave of Owen Brown and so all was complete.

The Negro Problem
I was long ago cured of the Negro Problem. I was the new generation, born free. Existentially I had it, because I never thought of myself as Negro, not even back in kindergarten. But how was I to share the explanation as an adult? This has been the burden of the Arts, and particularly for me, the literature. There it remains, solved and explained.