I spent two days talking to local people “born an’ bred in Batten Ruidge,” who had never heard of the museum. I spoke to Steele Burden, who is the founder of the museum and donor of more than one thousand artifacts. He graciously gave me one of the Negro caricatures he makes. I politely refused a proffered group of black men shooting craps and accepted a small figure of a sugarcane worker.
On this journey in search of the character of a folk museum, I was reminded that ignorance is not genetic. A lack of courage allows us to remain blinded to our own history and deaf to the cries of our past. The museum is visited by thirty thousand people annually, and is used as a research facility for certain courses at the university. I could wish that professors and the fifty volunteers who act as guides would be bold enough to point out not only the architecture and artifacts but the salient missing factor: our historical truth.
In 1992, as Americas mighty marketing machines were being oiled and checked to begin selling and celebrating Christopher Columbus’s feat of 1492, some people were reexamining with amazement and alarm another achievement that took place in Europe two decades after Columbus’s lauded discovery. In the early 1500s Niccolò Machiavelli, exiled from his Italian home, wrote a slim manual on power, how to gain it, how to wield it and how to keep it. He named the handbook The Prince and dedicated it to Lorenzo de’ Medici. The ideas therein so captured how to use what was base, weak and ignoble in the human psyche that for the past five hundred years when a person or action has been deemed devilish or satanically manipulative, it has been called Machiavellian. The advice he offered, which has been used so successfully against the powerless, can be paraphrased thus: Divide the masses that you may conquer them; separate them and you can rule them.
The staggering opposition to the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court and its reams of media coverage sent me again to The Prince. I shook my head in sad disbelief over the present-day relevance and use of ideas summarized nearly five hundred years ago for the sole purpose of instructing the mighty on the management of the powerless.
The African American community whirled in eddies of debate, demolition, disagreement, accusation and calumny over the matter of whether an African American man with a lamentable reputation and impressive credentials should be seated on the highest court in the land. Thomas, chosen and appointed by President George Bush, demonstrated that he is as conservative as the president and the Bush administration. Otherwise he would not have been selected. The African American savants knew that, and knew as well that if efforts to scuttle his appointment were successful, another conservative possibly more detrimental to the cause of blacks and one who has neither history nor culture in common with us would be seated firmly on the bench till death ruled otherwise.
Thomas himself gave his adversaries every reason to oppose and distrust him. Many of his audacious actions as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were anti-affirmative action, anti-busing and anti other opportunities to redress inequality in our country.
In a federal district court case, as assistant secretary for civil rights, he allegedly testified that he had deliberately disobeyed a court order requiring the Department of Education to conduct speedy reviews of discrimination complaints. That admission, along with his indifference to African American issues, has given even his most staunch supporters pause.
Thomas, a poor black from Pinpoint, Georgia, reached proximity to America’s highest court because of the very laws his forefathers fought to have written and enforced, and which he has treated so cavalierly.
It follows, then, that many African Americans ask, How can we advance if one we have sent forth in the vanguard ignores our concerns?
In these bloody days and frightful nights when an urban warrior can find no face more despicable than his own, no ammunition more deadly than self-hate and no target more deserving of his true aim than his brother, we must wonder how we came so late and lonely to this place. In this terrifying and murderous season, when young women achieve adulthood before puberty and become mothers before learning how to be daughters, we should stop the rhetoric and high-sounding phrases, stop the posing and preening and begin fiercely to look to our own welfare.
We need to haunt the halls of history and listen anew to the ancestors’ wisdom. We must ask questions and find answers that will help us to avoid dissolving into the merciless maw of history. How were our forefathers able to support their weakest when they themselves were at their weakest? How were they able to surround the errant leader and prevent him from being coopted by forces that would destroy him and them? How were they—lonely, bought separately sold apart—able to conceive of the deep wisdom found in the advice “Walk together, children … don’t you get weary.”
The black youngsters of today must ask black leaders, “If you can’t make an effort to reach, reconstruct and save a black man who has been to and graduated from Yale, how can you reach down here in this drug-filled, hate-filled cesspool where I live and save me?”
I supported Clarence Thomas’s nomination, and was neither naive enough nor hopeful enough to imagine that in publicly supporting him I gave the younger generation a pretty picture of unity. I wanted rather to show them that they and I come from a people who had the courage to exist, to be when being was dangerous, who had the courage to dare when daring was dangerous, and—most important—who had the courage to hope.
Because Clarence Thomas has been poor, has been nearly suffocated by the acrid odor of racial discrimination, is intelligent, well trained, black and young enough to be won over again, I supported him.
The prophet in Lamentations cried, “Although he put his mouth in the dust … there is still hope.”
How poor were you?
We were so poor we thought the only thing edible about a chicken was its feet, about the cow its tail, about a hog its intestine and its ankles.
Such one-liners can amuse because the listener knows that the person who isn’t aware of poverty is spared its most cruel lash. For it is hateful to be young, bright, ambitious and poor. The added insult is to be aware of one’s poverty.
Before television brought pictures of luxurious living rooms and glistening kitchens into the view of the impoverished, they could pretend, tell themselves that only the few, the lucky, maybe just their employers, lived lives of refined comfort.
But today, when every soap opera is rife with characters whose great wealth is only equaled by their moral neediness, paupers watching in shacks on every street are forced to admit that they are indeed poverty-stricken.
With that knowledge and acknowledgment, there comes inevitably a lingering despair and a puzzling wretchedness. Why them and not me? Those questions are followed by a sense of worthlessness—a remorseful regret at being alive. Then comes full-blown anger, resentment, a rankling bitterness that, if directed outward, can foment riots, revolution and social chaos. Most often, however, the convulsions of anger are directed inward. Thus the poor, the needy, the misfits of society implode. After the debris settles, they appear to the onlookers as dry husks of hopelessness.
If it is true that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, isn’t it also true a society is only as healthy as its sickest citizen and only as wealthy as its most deprived?
I believe so.
There has been a cacophony of sound, a screaming atonal symphony of noise in the African American community. Some serious thinkers and some ponderous prophets bemoan the chasm that exists between the sexes. The general consensus is that the rift is so wide and deep that it cannot be bridged. Hip-hop rappers prove the prognosis correct when they describe black women—their mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and their current squeezes—as ho’s, bitches and other menaces to the well-being of black men.
It is hard to comprehend how we have grown so far apart.
We were stolen and sold from the African continent together. We crouched together in the barracoons, without enough air to share between us. We lay, back to be
lly, in the filthy hatches of slave ships, in one another’s excrement, menstrual blood and urine. We were hosed down and oiled to give sheen to our skin, then stood together on auction blocks and were sold together. We rose before sunrise from the cold ground, were driven into the cane field and the cotton field together. We each took the lash that pulled the skin from our backs. Each of us was singled out for the sexual enjoyment and exploitation of those who desired our bodies but hated us.
How have we come so quickly to forget the lessons we were forced to learn together?
Why have we subjugated our memory in the vain hope that we will be able to live above and beyond history? When will we cease presiding over the mutilation of memory?
I prefer the remembrance, the painful bitter recall. I know that I need a brother who shares this tender, taunting heritage. I desire a sister who is not in denial of our mutual past. Together, we may be able to plan a less painful future. Separate, we can only anticipate further ruptures and deeper loneliness.
Some months ago two beautiful, powerful and world-famous women sat in my dining room. They were remarking about the danger of our time, the random shootings, the stalkings and the general mayhem and murder in the streets.
They asked how I dealt with violence. I answered that my response was mostly to stay out of its way if possible, but if it is brought into my life, then I do my best to oust it from my presence as quickly as possible. When they asked for an example I told them a story that involved my petite mother when she was visiting me in New York. We were invited to a party on Long Island and our hosts sent a limousine to take us to the affair. We went to 151st and Riverside to collect a sister friend who was going to attend the party.
Years before, the building had been a gracious, stately edifice with fine rugs and antique furniture in the lobby. There had been a doorman who spoke English and welcomed visitors with a courtly air.
I didn’t tell my mother that the once elegant building had fallen prey to the drug madness and that the doorman had long since departed, and that since the front-door lock had been broken, all the former gracious appurtenances had disappeared.
When we arrived at the building my little mother put her hand on an equally small person, a white television producer who was sharing the ride. “You come with me,” my mother said.
I said, “No, I’ll go get her.” My mother, whose voice was usually sweet and light, changed it into the rumble of a German tank and said, “You stay here—Al and I will go.”
I watched their backs as they entered the dirty lobby, and felt as if I were watching innocent Christians entering a lion-filled arena in Nero’s Rome.
I learned later that this is what happened: In the elevator Mother pressed the button for the sixth floor. The elevator immediately lurched downward. At the basement a man entered, unkempt and wild-eyed. He looked at my mother and the trembling white friend and asked, “How far are you going?” Mother picked up on the beat in a second: “I’m going all the way. I got in this elevator to go all the way. I mean all—the—way. How far are you going?” The man didn’t answer but got off on the first floor. My mother and her friend continued to their floor.
• • •
Somehow and for some vague and inane reason, we have decided it is better to be exploited, misused, battered and bedraggled than to become disagreeable. We think that possibly the brute, who is prepared to treat a victim in the most unkind way, will be coerced into being more kind if the victim is courteous. I don’t agree. If I am attacked, when I have done nothing to warrant an attack, or even if I have, I work myself up into a fury much more explosive than the miscreant can imagine. I jump into a righteous lather. And I mean to make myself more to deal with than the brute can handle. I mean if I can make myself get mad before I get scared the evildoer will rue the day.
miss rosie
when i watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when i watch you
in your old man’s shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week’s grocery
i say
when i watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be
(the best-looking gal in Georgia)
used to be called the Georgia Rose
i stand up
through your destruction
i stand up.
That poem was written by Lucille Clifton, an African American poet who teaches in universities all over the United States. It seems to me the perfect explanation of how we human beings have managed to stand erect—how, often brought to our knees by our own greed, chicanery or ignorance, we manage to pull ourselves up to a standing position.
Miss Clifton has suggested miss rosie, a beleaguered, battered and lonely old woman as her inspiration, and using the same poem, in each instance I insert the word “art,” for “miss rosie,” for I believe that art encourages us to stand erect and stretch upward toward the higher ground.
I believe that without the presence and energy of art in our lives, we are capable of engaging in heartless activities without remorse and cruelties with clear consciences. We become base because we think of ourselves only as base. We find no delight in immaterial things, and address ourselves and each other in the cruelest terms, for we believe we are deserving of nothing better.
I grew up in an Arkansas that seemed to me to be a place on no one’s planet or, for that matter, on no one’s mind. The relentless poverty of the Depression, allied with the virulent racial prejudices of the time, had the power to grind the spirit into submission and pulverize the very ability to dream. Yet, I, as well as others, survived those lean years and those mean Arkansas roads, and I think we survived particularly because of the inheritance of black American art, an inheritance left to us by our forebears as surely as steel magnates left massive fortunes for their heirs.
In Stamps, Arkansas, when parents on their way to the cotton fields left small children too young to work in the care of others too old to work, they knew that the baby tenders would recite Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poems to their children. Thus, even if a father was twenty miles away, his son would know of his fathers love for him because the older person would recite and act out:
Little brown baby wif spa’klin’ eyes,
Come to yo’ pappy an’ set on his knee.
What you been doin’, suh—
makin’ san’ pies?
Look at dat bib—you’s ez du’ty ez me.
Look at dat mouf—dat’s merlasses, I bet;
Come hyeah, Maria, an’ wipe off his han’s.
Bees gwine to ketch you
an’ eat you up yit,
Bein’ so sticky and sweet—goodness lan’s!
Little brown baby wif spa’klin’ eyes,
Who’s poppy’s darlin’
an’ who’s pappy’s chile?
Who is it all de day nevah once tries
Fu’ to he cross, er once loses dat smile?
Whah did you git dem teef?
My, you’s a scamp!
Whah did dat dimple com f’om
in yo’ chin?
Pappy do’ know you—
I b’lieves you’s a tramp;
Mammy, dis hyeah’s
some ol’ straggler got in!
Let’s th’ow him outen de do’ in de san’,
We do’ want stragglers
a-layin’ ’roun’ hyeah;
Let’s gin him ’way to de big buggah-man
I know he’s hidin’ erroun’ hyeah
right neah.
Buggah-man, buggah-man, come in de do’,
Hyeah’s a bad boy you kin have fu’ to eat.
Mammy an’ pappy do’ want him no mo’,
Swaller him down f’om his haid to his feet!
Dah, now, I t’ought dat you’d
hug me up close.
Go back, ol’ buggah,
you sha’nt have dis boy.
He ain’t no tramp, ner no straggler,
of co’se;
He’s pappy’s pa’dner an’ playmate
an’ joy.
Come to you’ pallet now—go to yo’ res’;
Wisht you could allus know ease
an’ cleah skies
Wisht you could stay jes’ a chile
on my breas’—
Little brown baby wif spa’klin’ eyes!
The strength of the black American to withstand the slings and arrows and lynch mobs and malignant neglect can be traced directly to the arts of literature, music, dance and philosophy that, despite significant attempts to eradicate them, remain in our communities today.
The first Africans were brought to this country in 1619. I do not mean to cast aspersions on my white brothers and sisters who take such pride in having descended from the Pilgrims, but I would remind them that the Africans landed in 1619, which was one year before the arrival of the Mayflower. We have experienced every indignity the sadistic mind of man could devise. We have been lynched and drowned and beleaguered and belittled and begrudged and befuddled. And yet, here we are. Still here. Here. Upward of forty million, and that’s an underestimate. Some people swear there are more than forty million black people in the Baptist Church. They’re not even including other denominations or backsliders or black atheists in the world. How, then, have we survived?
Because we create art and use our art immediately. We have even concealed ourselves and our pain in our art. Langston Hughes wrote:
Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter