by Cornel West
JANUARY 1, 1961
I CANNOT POSSIBLY CONCEIVE OF two brothers being any closer than Cliff and Cornel West. I followed him every minute of the day from sports to music to church. He taught me how to read when he first learned how to read. The way he walked and talked and related to people was the way I wanted to walk and talk and relate to people. He was my model in every sphere of life. On the streets and in the classrooms and sanctuaries of our childhood, the West brothers were indivisible and inseparable. Cliff was my model in every sphere of life. In fact, he made history as one of the first black kindergarten students enrolled in Topeka, Kansas after the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
Over the Christmas holidays Cliff said, “Time for us to get baptized.” We made the decision together, two brothers on a mission.
I thought about it. Thought about how, for years, I’d been watching my daddy’s daddy, the great Reverend Clifton L. West, Sr., come to deliver guest sermons at our church. He was a pillar of strength and a man dedicated to service. For years I’d been sitting under the teaching of our own deeply loved minister, Reverend Willie P. Cooke, whose humble person-to-person pastoring could bring the most cold-blooded sinner to salvation. We decided to make Jesus our choice on Christmas Day and to be faithful unto death with baptism on New Year’s Day. We vowed to never forget it.
We never have.
I was seven, Cliff was ten. I was seized by a spirit and, owing to the gravity of the decision, trembled with joy. I decided to love my way through the darkness of the world. We decided to go under the water. Even then I had a good sense of what it meant. We were making a choice. We were choosing the kind of love represented by a Palestinian Jew named Jesus whose hypersensitivity to the sufferings of others felt real and right. A lifetime later, it still feels real and right.
My parents sat there beaming. Their boys were following the same path as their parents and their parents’ parents. Following Jesus was no small matter in the West household. I remember someone asking, “Do you have pictures of Jesus all over your house?”
“We don’t have to,” I said. “We have Jesus in our hearts.”
This declaration, made arm in arm by two young black boys in Sacramento, California, in the early days of what would be one of the bloodiest and most disturbing decades in American history, would gain momentum and meaning as their bodies grew and their minds blossomed.
Jesus Christ at the center.
Jesus Christ as model and motivator, Jesus Christ as moral instructor, Jesus Christ as source of unarmed truth and unconditional love.
But that love, no matter how powerful and life-altering, was accompanied by other emotions far less ennobling.
THOSE WERE YEARS WHEN I was called Little Ronnie—Ronald is my middle name—and for Little Ronnie rage was perhaps the main ingredient. Like morning thunder, rage came early and rained over the first part of my life. I’m not sure I can explain it entirely. Psychological theories won’t do. I’m unable to name the cause of this restless anger that led to the violent behavior marking my childhood and troubling my parents to no end.
Little Ronnie was, in short, a little gangsta. When it came to confrontations of any kind, Little Ronnie was always up for big drama. Facing the most formidable opponent, he just wouldn’t back down. As a little kid, his hands were sore from fighting. He’d take on kids older and meaner and, more often than not, he’d prevail.
What were his motives for such outlandish behavior? Hard to say. He certainly wasn’t angry at his folks. Fact is, he adored them. Mom was a schoolteacher, a remarkably energetic woman with a rare gift for teaching young children to read. She would make her mark as a legendary educator. She taught first grade, became a principal—the first black person in both roles—and when she retired, so great was her contribution that the Irene B. West Elementary School was named in her honor.
Mom was in perpetual motion, a woman of dynamic intelligence, grace, and dignity. She was a quiet storm of charitable work and extraordinary instruction. Because of her sensitivity for children, it’s no surprise that her oldest son Cliff became a model student. You might assume the same for Little Ronnie, whom she showered with endless love and affection. But I’m afraid you’d be wrong. Little Ronnie was out of control.
Dad tried his best. And Dad, the sweetest and gentlest of men, was always cool. When he entered a room, his smile lit it up. He worked at McClellan Air Force Base for thirty-six years buying and selling parts for fighter jets, and was the most popular guy on the base. He was a college grad and, as an active Alpha, was also the most popular brother in his fraternity. (Later I, too, became an Alpha man.) Everyone loved Clifton L. West, Jr.
Nothing flustered Dad, not even Little Ronnie’s rebellious antics. Like Lester Young, the poetical laid-back saxophonist who floated over the beat like an angel floating over fire, Dad never got flustered. Mom might call Dad during the day and tell him that Little Ronnie had messed up again, gone after some kid in his class for God knows what reason. Mom would put me on the phone.
“Little Ronnie,” Dad would say, “when I get home, have the strap ready.” He’d arrive home, cool as a cucumber, give Mom a kiss—“How you doin’, baby?”—and then turn to me. “Boy, when you ever gonna learn?” After the whipping, he’d hug me and say, “Hope this is the last one.” Then we’d eat dinner and he’d watch sports or his favorite shows, like Bonanza or Gunsmoke.
No, I wasn’t rebelling against Mom and I wasn’t rebelling against Dad, who headed Shiloh’s social outreach program and, along with the other fathers, like Mr. Peters, in our neighborhood, created our Little League and built our ballparks with their own hands. When it came to my parents, I harbored no anger. Then, what was it?
In second grade, our teacher was Miss Silver, a lovely woman, who simply couldn’t deal with so many bad Negroes. Little Ronnie was the baddest of the bad.
“Where’s your lunch?” kindly Miss Silver would ask my classmate Linda.
“Mama forgot to pack it,” Linda would answer.
But I saw that every single day Linda’s mama forgot to pack her daughter a lunch. That was a funky situation. Shouldn’t have been. Linda needed to eat. So when I saw Bernard strolling into the classroom, a boy big as a barn with a lunch bag stuffed with goodies, I had to jump the brother, beat him up, and give some of his food to Linda. Drove poor Miss Silver crazy.
Miss Silver, though, had it easy compared to Mrs. Yee, my teacher in the next year. I loved Mrs. Yee, but Mrs. Yee and I had the worst encounter of my childhood. Happened in 1962 when I was nine.
“Students,” said Mrs. Yee, “please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance.”
Everyone got up—except me. I didn’t move.
“Please rise, Cornel,” she said. I still didn’t move.
“You heard me, Ronnie.”
I heard her, but I wasn’t rising. Even at that age, I had issues with America. Most of my fights had to do with bullies beating on weaker kids. Yet Mrs. Yee wasn’t a bully—she was a sweet woman who also happened to be pregnant—and she wasn’t preying on the weak. But she was insisting that I pledge allegiance to a flag that stood for some things I didn’t like. Her request stirred up ugly memories of racist treatment of my family in Jim Crow Texas during the summers and the piercing story of how my great uncle was lynched and his broken body was left hanging, wrapped in the American flag. In my little boy’s mind, I saw saluting the flag as an insult to my family and an imposition on my free will. If I didn’t want to pledge allegiance to the flag, I didn’t have to pledge allegiance to the flag.
“You will pledge allegiance to the flag!” she demanded, coming over to me and slapping my face. Something snapped inside me. Her slap stung and, just like that, I socked her in the arm. Hard in the arm. She ran out of the room and came back with the principal. Principal had a paddle and went after me. My partners and I jumped the principal until he had to back off. It was practically a riot. The principal expelled me.
When
told what had happened, Mom wept. Dad gave me the whipping of my life. And when that was over, I decided I had to leave. I had to run away from home. I packed my little bag and started leaving the house when Cliff saw me.
“What happened?” he asked. I told him about hitting the teacher. I said that to me the flag stands for a nation that treats us bad. I went on about how when we visited our grandparents over the summer we had to sit in the balcony of the movie theater, unable to sit on the ground floor where the white kids sat. I said that our dad and uncles fought for our country but our country didn’t treat them right.
“Well, all that’s true, baby bro,” said Cliff, “but where you off to?”
“Away.”
“Away to where?”
“Far away.”
“What’s that gonna do?”
“I don’t know.”
“When you get back, you just gonna get a worser whipping.”
I thought about what Cliff said, but I left anyway. Went down to the street to stay with a friend and his folks. But then a funny thing happened. My friend and his brothers ran around the house doing whatever they wanted. For some reason, that didn’t sit well with me. I disliked being there because their household had no rules. Rules, I realized, could be good, and often came from a place of love. So that very evening I took my little bag, went back home and, as Cliff predicted, got a worser whipping.
My rage, my antagonism, my aggression.
Why, where, and how?
Maybe I saw myself in some heroic Robin Hood role. I’d notice that poor kids came to our school without lunch money. Others had money to spare. So I forced the haves into giving to the have-nots. If anyone resisted, I’d beat them until they forked over their nickels and dimes. In the fighting itself, I turned into an unapologetic brute.
Mom would try to reason with me: “It’s not your responsibility to distribute the money among your classmates.”
Dad would try to reason with me: “You might think you’re helping some of these kids, but doing it by hurting others makes no sense, son.”
Reason, though, didn’t calm the storm raging inside me. Besides, it wasn’t just the money issues that triggered me. Big kids who teased littler kids got me just as incensed. I took it personally and beat up the big kids as if they had been picking on me. Every week my parents were given reports of a new incident, another fight, some classmate whose nose I had bloodied or even broken. In one encounter, I pinned a boy down on the ground and rubbed sand in his eyes. His whole family came after us. Were it not for Dad’s super-cool diplomacy, the thing could have blown up into full-scale warfare. Other times, I came close to actually killing some of my adversaries. I was a dangerous thug.
Only big brother Cliff could restrain me. That’s because big brother Cliff could handily kick my behind—and did so whenever I was out of control.
For all this bullying of the bullies, I wasn’t a big kid. In fact, I remained small until I went off to college. I wasn’t a kid who harbored negative feelings about my family. Not only did I feel deep love for Mom and Dad, but I had mad love for my grandparents as well.
Dad’s dad was Reverend C.L. West, Sr., pastor of the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma for forty years. A small, handsome man, he was a tower of strength and a paragon of Christian compassion. His life was all about self-sacrifice and spiritual growth. His drive to break through the boundaries that would imprison most men was extraordinary. Born in Hamburg, a hamlet outside Alexandria, Louisiana, he went through grade six only to learn that’s where the black school stopped. But Grandpa couldn’t be stopped. He walked, hitch-hiked, and rode borrowed bikes into Alexandria for six years straight years until he earned a high-school diploma.
One summer, I couldn’t have been older than four when Grandpa took me and Cliff, along with Mom and Dad, way out into the fields to meet his dad. This was my great-grandfather, James West, and his wife. They were sharecroppers and former slaves. I was fascinated by their grace, dignity, and old ways but was frightened by their frail appearance. They looked like skeletons, ghosts from a God-forsaken past.
After marrying Grandma Lovie O’Gywn, Grandpa moved to Tulsa when my dad, the baby of their children, was an infant. Granddad got a job as a bellhop in an upscale hotel while Grandma, the most elegant of women, built up her culinary skills to the point where she was catering for the governor of Oklahoma. These were some highly motivated folk. University of Tulsa wouldn’t admit even the most motivated Negro, though, so Grandpa held down his hotel job as he commuted to Langston University, an historically black land-grant school located about a hundred miles from Tulsa, where, in true West fashion, he didn’t leave before graduating. Later Grandpa and Grandma Lovie divorced—she told me that she never wanted to be married to a preacher—but both remained an integral part of my life when we visited Tulsa every summer.
Big Daddy—Mom’s father—was one bad brother. Born in Crowley, Louisiana, he chose to be maladjusted to injustice. Big Daddy was my kind of black man. Looking back, hearing how he talked back to whites that disrespected him, I’m amazed that he lived a long and fruitful life. He lived without fear or apology. When accused of miscegenation—his Creole wife was often confused for white—he scoffed at his accusers so threateningly that they thought it best to back off. A churchgoer and believer, he also told the deacons where to go when they chastised him for operating a liquor store. “I just don’t work in the store,” he’d say. “I own the store. Don’t toil for nobody but myself.” He carried a piece and would lovingly crush a motherhucker for unduly messing with him or his family.
When Mom was three, her mother complained of a bad tooth. During the day, the pain became unbearable and Big Daddy took his wife to the only hospital in Crowley. The sole black doctor was working elsewhere that week, and no white doctor would touch my grandmother. She was told to wait outside on the steps. The infection spread and within a day or two she passed. She was thirty-one. Enraged, Big Daddy could not be contained. Fearing for his safety, his friends urged him to leave town. That’s how he wound up in Orange, Texas, just across the border. Of his seven children, five would go to college. His second wife, T’Rose, was a loving force in all our lives.
Mom went off to Fisk University in Nashville, where she met my father in August 1949. By year’s end they were married. She was seventeen, he was twenty-one. Dad had gone into the Army after high school to benefit from the GI Bill. There was no other way to pay for college. He served in Guam and Okinawa for two years, then showed up at Fisk, where he became a member of the service-oriented Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. He was a star basketball player who, even with his average height, could dunk the ball authoritatively.
But the Army called him back and sent him to Fort Hood near Killeen, Texas. Meanwhile, Mom, who had given birth to Cliff in 1950, returned to college at Dillard University in New Orleans. When Dad was transferred to Fort Bliss, way out in El Paso, he wouldn’t dream of going without his family. Consequently, Mom’s college career, just like Dad’s, was cut short. Fort Bliss is where I was conceived, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, home of my father’s preacher daddy, is where we moved after Dad’s stint was up.
I was born in Tulsa on June 2, 1953. But University of Tulsa still refused blacks, so my folks’ next stop was Topeka, Kansas. For two years we lived on the campus of Washburn College where Dad earned his degree.
Around the time of the birth of my sister Cynthia in 1955, Dad found work at the Forbes Air Force Depot. When the depot closed, he applied for a teaching job in Washington, D.C. His credentials were superb and he was quickly accepted. The letter of acceptance, though, had one proviso. They demanded a photo of Dad before giving the final word. He sent the photo and the final word came back: Sorry, Mr. West, no job. They had presumed anyone that qualified had to be white.
My father was always a favorite in the workplace, and the senior officers at Forbes recommended him to three other bases: one in Alabama, a second in Pennsylvania, and a third in Sacramento. My parent
s knew California had the superior educational system, so they chose Sacramento.
Before we left Topeka, though, one incident from over a half-century ago continues to haunt me. On a sunny Sunday afternoon, the West family—Mom, Dad, Cliff, Cynthia, and myself— were out for a drive. For no good reason, the police pulled Dad over. He was told disrespectfully by an officer to get out of the car. The officer then looked in the car and called Mom the b-word. My cool, calm, and collected dad exploded. The next thing we knew, Dad was being hauled off to jail. Back home, Mom comforted us with prayer. “Just trust in the Lord,” she said. “Your father will be home soon.” And he was.
We moved to Sacramento in August 1958. Shortly after my sister Cheryl was born in 1959, Mom went right back to college. No brothers have ever been more devoted to and appreciative of their sisters. Cliff and I adored Cynthia and Cheryl. Cynthia, our oldest sister possessed incredible sensitivity and undeniable compassion. She was a member of the California State Hall of Fame in gymnastics. Her heart was always overflowing with laughter. Like all the West kids, she excelled in school.
Cheryl was our cherished baby girl. Early on, she followed her own path. That meant pursuing her deep love for animals. Her extraordinary ability to identify with others was always an inspiration to us. She enacted and embodied a tremendous empathy.
The West family looked like this: Corn and Cliff on one side, like white on rice; Cynthia and Cheryl on the other side, like wet on water; and Mom and Dad the loving bond holding us all together.
BY THE EARLY ’60S MOM had her degree in education and was teaching first grade in the Elk Grove school district. She had a heart and gift for teaching young people to read. I have no doubt that her heart was broken time and again when she saw how her second son was unable to control his violent temper. Teachers complained; parents of kids I attacked complained; and in the instance when I struck Mrs. Yee, the school principal himself brought the news of my expulsion to my mother. Given my love and respect for my parents, you would think I’d find a way to curb my fury. But Little Ronnie could not and would not listen to anyone. For reasons that remain mysterious to this day, Little Ronnie was born to rebel; the kid was primed to slug it out with anyone he considered an oppressor.
