'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  Telephones were tapped in those days. Every black man who raised his placard and his voice in protest of racial discrimination was regarded as an “extremist.” “Extremist” carried the same weight of guilt as “terrorist” today.

  I wanted to be known as a writer. Even as a black writer. Or as a Negro writer. Or even as an Afro-Canadian writer. And I saw the danger, to myself, and to my career, by being associated so closely to political extremism. I wanted also to be able to separate my life as a writer from my life as a man. I did not, and still do not, consider the two to be one and the same.

  And as luck would have it, I was invited, at this time in 1967, to visit Yale University, to give a reading of my short stories. How this came about is purely a stroke of luck. Luck has always followed me, in my life, in all its aspects, in all places where my life has taken me, in all conditions, and situations that include love, career, pleasure, travel, every aspect of human endeavour. It is the luck of the cat, of the black cat, no pun intended, as a reminder of the term “cat” used by the hip black musicians such as Miles and Trane and Duke and Count and Bird. I mean the nine-lives cat, falling from a fling through a window on the second floor, and landing on all fours. That kind of luck has wrapped me in its blanket of protection; and even before the demonstration of luck, I have the declaration of the Fates, the gods that Greeks and Romans consulted before any important event or act, the strong sense of instinct that is a part of being black, meaning having that ancestral connection to Africa.

  It began quite simply. And unexpectedly. A professor of history at Berkeley College in Yale University, Robin W. Winks, who hailed from a small town in Iowa, was doing research into his writing a book, which eventually was published as The Blacks in Canada, A History, and he had come across in his research a “magazine” which I had a hand in editing, Ebo Voice. Could he have a couple of copies? And what would I charge him?

  The “magazine” in question was nothing more than a couple of plain pages copied on a Xerox machine, perhaps they were stencilled, containing a few poems by me, a word by Howard Matthews, a poem by Charlie Roach — nothing to write home about. And I would have shouted, “Five dollars each!” had it not for the fact that my friend Jan Carew, recently emigrated from London, England, where he had lived for years, was visiting me, on Asquith Avenue; and when I told him of the request of the professor, he said, “Ask him to invite you to Yale to give a reading. You will have that in your curriculum vitae for life!”

  You will have that in your curriculum vitae, for life!

  Life and curriculum vitae turned out in the same mould as the luck I was talking about.

  I made the trip, on the invitation of the professor, to Yale, where I gave a “tea,” as a seminar at Berkeley College is called. And after the two days at Yale, I went down to New York and Harlem, where I interviewed Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), a second time, and Paule Marshall, and John Henrik Clarke, the editor of Freedomways magazine, a black journal that specialized in black literary and political affairs; and Max Roach, who had just composed his jazz opera, Freedom Now Suite, in which his wife, at the time, Abbey Lincoln, screams herself hoarse in imitation of Africa’s woes and joys, and protest; and I drank my Cutty Sark Scotch at the Red Rooster in Harlem; visited all the jazz joints in Greenwich Village and on Broadway, and heard Thelonious Monk on piano, wearing his beret, and dancing out of tune to the harmonic music he had just played in a solo; and eventually returned to Toronto, a man with the new tonic of prospect and a future, in academia, or in writing.

  And a few months later, another flash of luck reached me. I was invited back to Yale to spend one month as a Morse Fellow at another college, Pierson College, to talk about creative writing and anything that came into my mind. Appointed with me at the same time was William Caldwell, the famous sculptor of mobiles. In the two months I spent there, I never rested my eyes on Mr. Caldwell. Perhaps, he was, like his mobiles, spinning in the wind.

  But I had met the chaplain of Yale, a rebel of a man of the cloth, William Sloane Coffin, who later gained notoriety and fame and the congratulations of American college students throughout the country for his opposition to the Vietnam War, raging inconclusively in the nationalist hearts of young men; and after that, his part with the Dr. Spock burning draft cards in public in defiance of President Richard Nixon and H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman and J. Edgar Hoover the FBI chief, and the thickened paranoia of the entire Nixon administration. And a scientist from Harvard who was visiting Yale, Dr. Gerry Wall, spoke to me in scientific terms that I could understand. And when Yale became too serious and intellectual, I sought refuge in Harlem and in Greenwich Village, and the Five Spot, and the Ninth Circle, because Dylan Thomas had drunk all those whiskeys at one sitting on a stool on the bar’s carpet, three inches thick with the shells of parched peanuts, a record, in one night, his last night on earth, glorying in the feat of accomplishment, “not going gentle in the good night” of the Village’s ambiance.

  And then, my last day as a Morse Fellow, the professor of history, the author of The Blacks in Canada, Robin W. Winks, invited me to lunch at Calhoun College, whose master was Professor R.W.B. Lewis, an authority on Edith Wharton. Present were Robert Penn Warren, professor of English, who taught also creative writing in a system of having each student write one page each day; C. Vann Woodward, professor of history, called the Southern Historian, and Professor Sydney E. Ahlstrom, professor of American studies. The lunch was college fare, not exciting, but exciting in its context, in the Calhoun College dining hall. I do not remember what we ate. But toward the end, the question was posed by Professor Lewis, “How would you teach Afro-American literature if you were asked?”

  And since I was not asked, at least I did not see the implication; and since by now I had added to by two visits to Yale to my curriculum vitae; and I could forever boast of this experience, I became expansive, and said that if I had the chance to teach Afro-American literature — certainly not at Yale, for this was beyond belief and realism — I would teach it comparative to African literature in English translation, and West Indian literature, and I reeled off dozens of names of those writers, and they looked at me, and smiled, and sipped their coffee, and I was thinking of The Five Spot and Miles Davis, and the Red Rooster in Harlem …

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The light was bad, although it was a Friday, even though Friday has always had a way of interposing itself between me in brief periods of exhilaration and moments of my despondency, providing the relief of a hiatus between the bad days and the good days of my disposition. Haze, like a curtain of voile, a blind of confusion and of indecision was covering the sun. And it covered my spirit, too, just as a curtain covers the props on the stage that give the play its meaning and its significance.

  I found myself on this Friday morning, in an embarrassing posture of imprecating: applying for a visa to permit me to work in America, to work at Yale University in a one-year appointment, Visiting Lecturer in the Department of English and in the American Studies Program; and this desire following on the heels of my anti-American belligerence — after all those cold nights sitting on the sidewalk in front of the U.S. Consulate General, protesting the murder of Medgar Evers, protesting the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; followed by all those warm afternoons and nights, marching up and down, with placards like Roman shields made out of paper and cardboard, with strident voice, deprecating the same America, through which front door I now enter; now, a supplicant: then, a miscreant, labelled “Canada’s angriest black man,” because I was a member of the culture of anti-American protest, adding my small voice to the racist treatment of black people in America, and to the bombings America carried out against the brown people of Vietnam, with extraordinary violence greater than all the violence of bombs dropped during the Second World War.

  “Mr. Clarke, you are politically controversial. And I doubt whether you’ll ever get a visa to live in the United States.”

  The American Consul Genera
l at Toronto was smiling as he told me this. It was in July 1968. He was a man of some intelligence, and sophistication; and in spite of his place and position in the diplomatic bureaucracy of the most powerful nation on earth, he had startled me with his sense of humour. I had not ever associated humour with American diplomacy. But I was aware that the powerful, at times chosen by themselves, and that are beneficial to themselves, can express bouts of humour. But this general humour, and sophistication, I have found absent, too often, from the manner of most white Americans of his position.

  “You don’t like us,” he added. I suspected that he did not want me to like America, either, and had come to realize that anyone like me would not like America, certainly not the America of 1968, and certainly not in the same way as the amorphous “middle-American” does.

  Our conversation continued in a courteous but firm manner; and the little sympathy he permitted himself to expose to me, did in no way delude me into thinking that there could ever be a change of heart. I was left to consider myself as some kind of celebrity, a kind of notorious, but dangerous, person to be watched by foreign missions, and this importance both startled me and pleased me.

  “But you can always inform Yale University about your visa problems. And I’m sure Yale will get the visa to you.”

  He was introducing me to a structure of power, a system of academic power of which I myself was too unsophisticated to conceive. There were other powers in the most powerful nation on earth. The consul did not even have to add “In no time at all!” but he did so nevertheless. And this seemed to be the re-emphasis of what Yale University really meant, in terms of its power and capacity to solve matters of a politically ticklish nature.

  I had told him, with no mincing of words, that I felt I was doing his country, America, a great honour by wanting to live within the boundaries of its cauldron of consumptive racialism. The year was, after all, 1968. And I had made it clear to him, that by going to America, I would be sacrificing whatever peace of mind I might have accumulated in the thirteen years I had been living in Canada, for one year in America; and that I had absolutely no intention of wanting to remain longer than the one year I had been contracted to teach Afro-American literature at Yale University. My appointment was in the Department of English and in the American Studies Program; jointly.

  The consul could not have believed, nor appreciated the intensity of my despising his country in such a cavalier manner. In his mind, every living person, in particular poor people from poor countries (and as a West Indian I would have qualified in American eyes as a poor immigrant), still regarded America as the land of opportunity — if not the land of the free and the brave. For certainly he would have seen the long lines of Canadian applicants, European and Latin-American applicants fleeing socialism in their countries, and some few West Indian applicants, in winter and in summer, stomping the cold and the fear in their feet, as the line, long as a snake wrapped around a man’s body, all waiting for the chance to go to America, to live; and “to make the Yankee dollar.” And the consul would have understood how it was possible for all these people, from all corners of the world, displaced for various political and social reasons, who want to jump into the frying pan of American materialism.

  The country has advantages; and he, as consul, would have to conclude, and inform his government that America was still well-liked by all these foreigners, that the motivation for this great wave of immigration was based upon something other than greed; and that because of this materialistic greed, the applicants, now transformed through their greed into supplicants, would tend not to be revolutionaries and communists and terrorists. And naturally, seeing that I was a West Indian, it was possible for him to feel that I might not want ever to return from America to Canada.

  But we did not belabour the point.

  He did however, inform me that my being “controversial” and “political” was the indictment decided upon, not primarily by the Canadian government (who certainly would not reverse an American indictment), nor was it the opinion of the U.S. Consulate General in Toronto. It was, rather, the conclusion of a consul general in Barbados, a conclusion based upon her memory of me, when I visited my home in 1964, soon after my first novel, The Survivors of the Crossing, was published, soon after I had interviewed Malcolm X in New York. This conclusion was made by a woman, by the name of Miss Eileen R. Donovan, American Consul General (as she signed her name in the Barbados Advocate newspaper), in a letter addressed to me.

  I had been speaking in Barbados about the racial problem in America, and Miss Donovan, her country’s representative to my country, felt she should explain America’s position on the subject of racism. This is Miss Donovan’s letter to the Barbados Advocate:

  I am concerned by a by-lined article which appeared on page 8 of your August 11 edition, originating in Barbados by Austin C. Clarke who is stated to be a Barbadian living in Canada, now here on assignment for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

  Mr. Clarke, like anyone else living in a free society, enjoys the right to write what he chooses, however factually incorrect and dangerous misleading it may be.

  One can only wonder why the Advocate chooses to publish such mixed-up material advocating violence by Negroes in the United States, since the purpose of a free Press in a free society is to inform rather than incite.

  One must also wonder for whom Mr. Clarke speaks. If such views are merely his own personal opinions, he should say so, and so should the Advocate. If he speaks for some group in Canada or elsewhere which shares his views he should also say so.

  I can tell you and your readers, however, that there is one group for which he does not speak, and that is the American Negro citizens of my country, 99% of whom would reject and resent his views as firmly as I do. Eileen R. Donovan, American Consul General.

  I cannot remember, and have no document to show what I wrote that drove Miss Donovan to express such paternalism hardly concealed beneath her more obvious patronizing superciliousness; and her attitude, when seen against the background of the civil rights movement in America, in 1964, and the cruelty of American police and sheriffs and governors and mayors, is ironic. But even more puzzling (though not to the population of Barbadians whose understanding of the racial problems in America in 1964, was, to say the least, naive), is her presumption that there is a similarity of nationalistic sentiment amongst “99 percent of

  the American Negro,” and that she was certain that this 99 percent of black

  Americans agreed with her that they “regarded themselves as American.” What kind of Americans? Second-class?

  But Miss Donovan’s position was historically consistent with American delusion regarding racism in their society: many white Americans presumed to be able “to speak for the Negro American.” I found myself, as a black man living in Canada, and a Barbadian by birth, being deliberately vilified in my own country, by a foreign white woman, an American diplomat, who was justifiably diplomatic in trying to prevent the domestic racial problems in her own country, from being exposed in an area of the world where American foreign policy is to influence the thinking of this unthinking Barbadian population, and to establish good “race relations.” But Miss Donovan’s position was not, and could not be justified on the basis of fact. It is a trifle mundane now to say what I said then, in 1964, in reply to her letter, that America was a country of inexplicable anti-black hostility. But is it really inexplicable? The reasons for racism swirling inside America have been let out of the bag.

  But it was important to me to set Miss Donovan straight. And then, I ignored her: she was not, as an intellectual thinker, important to my life.

  Her decision to write the letter to the editor might have been motivated by a collective embarrassment in which her country got itself entangled, and which it had tried to make palatable through its neo-imperialist relations with some West Indian countries, in order to maintain American influence in the West Indies. But only the most gullible and messianic West Indian prim
e ministers would swallow this American public relations program. Miss Donovan’s letter could not have been understood in all its paternalistic implication by the average Barbadian; and it probably was not regarded by the Barbadian as either offensive or neo-imperialistic, because this class of Barbadian did not have the first-hand experience of living in America during the early 1960s at the height of the civil rights movement, and the reality of racism in which that exposure would have educated him; and he would be in the dark regarding Miss Donovan’s own government’s reaction to the demands of the “Negroes in America” for justice; and furthermore it would have been impossible for the ordinary Barbadian to see clearly the dichotomy between the American public relations program of good race relations in the West Indies, and the application of that “good race relations” within America, as it related to the “Negroes” living in America. For these “Negroes,” according to Miss Donovan, are American citizens.

  But Miss Donovan had apparently not forgotten me. Nor, had she forgiven me. In fact, she had white-listed me. And she might have white-mailed me, also! But this was understandable. It was understandable from her position of power. In matters of this nature, I have, for many years, found that justice is not a significant factor in the consideration of morality. It is rather a factor of power. So, I was both impressed and startled when the American consul in Toronto introduced me to the avenues of power at Yale University. And he seemed to be suggesting that I might use these avenues of power in order to leap-frog the obstacle placed in my path by another American consul.

  In this position of some irony, I felt as if I had been introduced to the “power game” itself, and had become a participant in its execution. It was a delusion that I could, and did, indulge in, at that time. Had I persisted in this delusion, the stony fact of the consequences of my puny literary and ideological entente with Miss Donovan, reminded me promptly of this home truth: I was still being haunted in Toronto, four years after the exchange between Miss Donovan and I that took place in Barbados, and thousands of miles away from Barbados, with an exchange of three letters in the Barbados Advocate; and the person responsible for giving this importance to my letters, was a consul general.