'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  The Calhoun College Committee carried this report of the mixer which had caused the problem, a copy of which was given to me by the master. Here is the relevant portion of that report:

  A greater than usual crowd of High School and younger students attempted to get into the mixer. This was due to a mistake of advertising the dance over WYBC-FM [the Yale radio station], to all of New Haven, while we expected it to be broadcast only to Yale students. WYBC was asked to retract their invitation, but they did not do so. By 9.30 the crowd of young people outside the gate was so large and rowdy that the gates were closed by the police. Almost all ID’s were checked through the gates. In the living room, the people who had gotten past the gates now had to get past Jack Shaw. They did not want to pay the $2.00, nor have their ID’s checked again by him, and by 11.00 he was being pushed bodily through the doors. Finally, in the dining room, certain inebriated Sophomores were heard discussing the possibilities of starting a fight. The crowd conditions would have made a fight and the resulting flight from the dining hall disastrous. The Social Committee and the University would be liable for any injuries incurred as a result.

  Jack Shaw then stated that he decided to check all ID’s of all people when he noticed a lot of too young looking people trying to get in and when he heard people had been coming in through windows in the Grotto, the Fellows Lounge and the Master’s Garage. Furthermore, he noticed ID passing and people faking the stamp on their hands.

  Stan Royal added that he saw an atmosphere of fear from the beginning that something might happen, and attributed this to the Soc. Comm. and the police being frightened by the mass of Blacks inside and out.

  Clay did not deny this. A partial [underlined in the report] purpose of this mixer, of paying the extra money to have “Au Natural” play was to attract Blacks. The “fear” came from the name calling outside the gate, and rumours that Sophomores looking for fights, and the number of High School and younger students who seem to have gotten into the dance by various methods, for whom we are liable. The responsibility of the Social Committee is to Calhoun students alone; if outsiders cause disruption we do not want them here. By agreement with the police, the mixer was closed down at 11.00 to prevent trouble.

  The above clarification led to a discussion of the possibilities of prevention of re-occurrence. Tony Salzman began by proposing that the checker be moved from the main door to the living room. It is impossible to do that because there is no way to keep the people from coming up through the basement and keep the ladies room open at the same time. Next he proposed that we strictly impose ID checking. It was explained that we have been doing this, but perhaps with not enough scrupulosity. Then the problem of whom to let in was discussed. The people to be let in for free are Calhoun men and their dates and females showing college ID’s. Those who should pay are other Yale men and their male guests. No others should be let in to the college during a mixer.

  Stan Royal then asked if the problems at last week’s mixer meant that “Au Natural” and similar groups would not be asked to play again. Bennett replied that was definitely NOT TRUE. More precautions should be taken beforehand, and the mixers should not be advertised. The Committee ordin-arily cannot afford to pay $250 for their band, however. The price of the band in this case was offset by the intake at the door of $130, of which Jack Shaw was paid $20.

  It was at this time, and through this incident, that I first began to regard myself less as a West Indian, and more as a black man living in America, a black man who previously would boast openly and proudly of the fact that I was West Indian in origin and in attitude. And I would brag that this West Indian background gave me a special perspective of the racial problems in America. The West Indian perspective also relieved me of much of the automatic distrust with which I noticed most, if not all of the black students regarded both the university and the white people associated with the University. “When the Master talk, and I hear that Southern accent,” a black student of Berkeley College told me, at lunch one day, “it just reminds me of the South.” And in their distrust of white, the black student included other blacks, those few local New Haven blacks who had recently been hired by the university in positions with very high-sounding titles, with the minimum of power and influence, to change the ingrained condition of black neglect.

  I would tell myself before this incident with the mixer, as I stood chatting with a white professor, or to his wife, a now faded Manhattan beauty dressed in wools, or as I stood in the kitchen of the Master’s House in any of the colleges, exchanging jokes for jokes, parrying with vague academic ideas with his wife, that I was Austin Clarke, and that by that identification, being Austin Clarke, I was therefore, my own man: capable of entering a relationship with the university and with the faculty on terms which if I did not myself establish, at least were terms I could break, that I was “man enough to handle,” should the implications and innuendos in those terms attempt to slice away from what my black students constantly called “my manhood.” I could stand up at any cocktail party, sit at any dinner table in the university, in the president’s huge mansion on Hillhouse Avenue, in the dining room of John Hersey, novelist and master of Pierson College, which was across the street from my apartment, accepting his invitations to dinner, at which I was introduced to the stellar company of his friends, such as Dave Brubeck, a Knopf publisher, or the son of a publisher, without once feeling out of place, or that I was “a token Negro,” that “my manhood” was being compromised. I could swap anything they were swapping, and still be able to tell myself that I was Austin Clarke, and unattached from what Roy Bryce-Laporte, the head of Black Studies called, “the racialistic obligation of being a black man at Yale,” from the collective image of having to be black, and bad, a sentiment I suspected all black students to have, and which I had refused to accept as the barometer of my social intercourse with the Yale community. I was pretending instead, that I was whole and free. But I was self-indulgently delusionary. It was a tenuous, self-destructive posture of individuality. And individuality on the part of a black man who teaches at Yale, or is a student there, is an impossible philosophy of life and of behaviour, to maintain with any semblance of consistency. For you are not looked upon as an individual.

  In those days of beautiful weather, in the early days of the first semester in 1968, I was the only black man, not a little popular with the men and the women, students, professors and wives, and I was teaching anything related to a Black Studies Program that Yale was trying to conceive as an established and serious academic curriculum related to the life of black students and black people.

  I am certain now that the program that I helped to initiate at Yale will never be anything more than a scant concession to the presence and the pressure put upon the program by black students; and to the psychological pressure of the students themselves, to the larger black community both around Yale and throughout America. When a comparison with the programs at other universities is made, Yale bluntly insists that its program is the best. This is probably the case. It is certainly not the worst. For Yale is Yale. And the best Black Studies Program must therefore be instituted first at Yale. This was the intention. But has the ambition to be the first amongst the Ivy League colleges been achieved?

  I had suspected that the black students had fabricated an image in which they meant to put me; one that was acceptable to them. They could see me only as a black man. Perhaps, also, as a foreign black man. Any cultural distinctiveness that I might have would be viewed by them against the pervasive black cultural nationalism which their own chauvinism would readily tell them that they were superior, if not contemporary to my West Indian background. And in my present predicament, I might even have conceded the point. But they had never thought it worthwhile to advise me of the precise image in which they wanted me to operate. And since I resent categorization of any kind, and from any source, I tended to reject both the image imposed upon me, and the black students’ own attitude about images. I am a writer. And I regard
myself as a writer; and if I am not, then I am nothing. But I also know that even if only for the sake of being practical, when I am in America, I am black. Black. Phobogenically black. “Unforgiveably black,” as they said of the great black heavyweight boxer, Jack Johnson. I also have no delusion that for some, I am first and foremost, a black man, a Negro, a nigger.

  It is irrelevant that Yale University, in a moment of panic in June 1968, and due also to the shortage of “qualified professionals” to teach in the recently formed Black Studies Program, presumed that I was academic and qualified enough, capable to be on its faculty to teach its students. All that is irrelevant. And because it is, I deliberately ignored the pain and the confusion and the loneliness of the black faces I could see around me, waiting across the plaza of the Bieneke Rare Book Library, after the sun had fallen behind the ugly brick, so strong and everlasting and terrifying in its unwillingness to rot and crumble, and the other durable buildings of the Old Campus, and after this sinking sun had eaten off the topmost pillars of Woolsey Hall, I would see these black students rushing to dinner there, dressed in the walk and posture of the pimp of Harlem (whom they were then imitating as a symbolic gesture of their own rebelliousness), a walk, which if anybody knows anything about black people, is a manifestation of black rebellion and alienation — at the same time — against the temporary surroundings in which black people find themselves, encircled so to speak, as if they were in fact, part of the cold, heavy, formidable architecture surrounding them. For they hope, these young black students at Yale, to emerge untouched by all this architecture, by all this “bullshit” which is what they call the architecture, and which they claim is; and they expect too, that their sojourn here, three to four years, will not hold them suspect in the eyes of the more healthy, more “un-colonized brothers” who remain in the American ghetto, because they cannot leave it; and who die of hunger and frustration, but with their “shit together,” which is to say too, that these untouched, unspoiled “brothers” have lived a life that did not have a university in it, to add to their confusion, that no university had muddled their heads with useless philosophy and theorems, out of joint, with the rhythm of their lives as men, as black men; and useless in the practical sense that the rewards to them from such an education are circumscribed by the condition of racism in the country.

  I refused to accept the image I could see reflected in the smiles of some of my colleagues. I did not regard many on the Yale faculty as colleagues: not in that professional sense. There were however, a few exceptional exceptions. And these were men with whom I would drink and discuss matters of life, my life and theirs, as that “life” could not be touched by such a commonplace and topographical phenomenon as race in this country. These were men brave enough to want to talk about things that had nothing to do with the racial situation in America, at the time.

  And although the question of race (“Now, as a black professor, what do you think of the social life at Yale?”), was never brought up, there still lingered some preoccupation with it that I could discern, in many ways, on the face, in the handshake, in the invitation — or lack of invitation — in the little hasty chats along corridors in the Hall of Graduate Studies … “Tell me, who is the gentleman sitting next to me?” a senior professor in the Department of English once asked his neighbour at a department meeting. “Oh yes, of course, Professor Austin Clarke. I’ve heard a lot about him!” That was the time when I was the only black man attending these meetings. A singular experience. The preoccupation had been allowed to slip out as a mild shock; and soon all such preoccupation with IT could be “externalized” and seen as liberalism. But IT was there then. IT was there with the ivy, with the now-defunct “Rebel Nights” at Calhoun College, when white students from the South used to sing songs that contained messages and insults, as if they had not heard of the outcome of the American Civil War, and therefore could not accept a northerner’s version of the history that the war was indeed over.

  When the rumour, “There’s a lot of stealing nowadays,” began to circulate, and Pierson College, which almost faces the escape route to the New Haven black community locked its gates after six o’clock in the afternoon, and nearby Branford College followed suit, some felt that the stealing was being done by black youth, and that the gates were closed against their rambling through quadrangles and into students’ rooms. IT was there. And IT is there in the whole question of enrollment of black students; and in the inordinate number of black women serving in the kitchens of the dining halls of the twelve colleges, with the cleaners of rooms, this extraordinary number of black hands doing manual labour; black hands and black help in the positions which have traditionally been reserved for the descendants of that black man cut into the stained-glass window in blazing colours when the sun hits it, in the lounge of the dining hall of Calhoun College.

  I saw IT and I refused to believe that it could ever apply to me. Everyone knew or should have known that I was already an established writer before I came to Yale. Everyone knew I was a West Indian, and they should have known too, that there was no point in trying to keep me close to them, as assurance and protection from the racial apocalypse which so many people, Norman Mailer, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and Stokely Carmichael, thought was in the next rainfall, and which was on the minds of so many persons, as it had been in the mind of the master of Calhoun College, following the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

  The master of Calhoun College had said he was glad I was living in his college; my black presence might prove to be the bulwark against the possibility of black violence which some of his own black students might have been induced into inflicting against their alma mater; and I, the West Indian, was going to be the protector of the master against the Black American!

  Looking back now, with considerably more objective judgment, on a time characterized by a national lack of objectivity, I do not see the insult in the master’s statement, as vividly as I saw it then.

  A distraught black female undergraduate told me one day, “Yale niggers is supposed to be the brightest niggers in the country!” She said something else which challenged both the truths contained in her statement. But the more significant part of her statement, spoken in rage and disillusionment, was that although she herself was at Yale, she was still regarded as a “nigger.” She probably regarded herself as a “nigger.” How could this be? She was, after all, married to Yale, although she confessed that she tended to forget that she could never be regarded as a “Yalie” in the same way as one would regard George Pilling, the author of the Calhoun College Social Committee report, to be. For Mr. Pilling did manifest a close identification with his institution, in almost natural ties of kinship. And this young black woman can never see Yale in that same sense. She sees other black students as “niggers,” and her view of them in this context, has nothing to do with the brotherly, loving use of this term. Her rage disqualified her use of the term “nigger” from being an affectionate one, or a compassionate one.

  The young black woman’s remarks caused me to wonder if I myself was seen as the Calhoun College “show nigger” in the same way that I would say that the tall, handsome, and intellectually brilliant man from Trinidad is the Branford College “nigger.” I know that Ken would have repudiated this description. And he would argue that there was nothing about his relationship to his college, or to Yale, that should make me conclude this. But in the final analysis, it has nothing to do with him, and it has nothing to do with his own definition as a “radical,” and this is beyond anything that he might think of himself. For it is the definition that the university attaches to his association with it, and with Branford College, that counts.

  And the fact that at Branford, the master makes a more serious attempt to dispense his broadmindedness, and use his New England brand of liberalism against the more recalcitrant other masters and faculty members to demonstrate that there are “legitimate” black intellectuals at Yale, still it can be said that my friend, Ken, in spite of all th
is, is a “grander show nigger.” I think that Ken understands this. For he is, like me, a West Indian; and like me, has lived in Canada, and in England, for many years. America cannot therefore put much over on him. And although he shuns us, his black colleagues, because we are not radical, and probably also because in his estimation we are not bright like him, yet we, students and faculty alike, know that, as the black American hipster puts it, he’s “got his shit together.” Because if he hasn’t, time will tell him that his only allies at Yale are the black occupants of his similar incarceration.

  It was therefore with a tinge of envy, though with understanding, that I — we — saw Ken towering in every way over the audience and the students, in more senses than the obvious one, in the Ingalls skating rink that night of symbolic crisis (Yale itself is in some ways, synonymous with symbolic crises), when the university, gripped in its rivalry with Harvard over the question of radicalism, tried to do something equally radical (as Harvard), about the presence of the ROTC on its campus. The Harvard students had already played out their dramatization of radicalism, on the Cambridge campus and in the newspapers of the entire country, on the question of the Harvard ROTC. So, Yale therefore had to manufacture a similar concern for the ROTC, and for the war in Vietnam, and for related moral protests. And when that happened, you should have seen this man, not unlike Frederick Douglass in stature of dignity and of brilliance, but in some ways also more like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., guiding the multitude of Yale’s white students, instructing them in the fieldwork of the principles of revolution and confrontation tactics to be used against Yale, his employer, in the same way as he might have opened their minds in his college seminars, showing them as he eventually succeeded in doing, with a modicum of success, how to fight the university on the issue of its moral responsibility, because it was a sponsor of the ROTC on its campus.