by Cornel West
Delores existed as a young girl, but she was also an idea. She stopped the shudder. She stopped my heart. She took my breath away. She seemed to say, In this world where death is always imminent, always threatening, always frighteningly possible, I can make you happy with a simple smile.
Then there was Eliot’s smile.
Eliot Hutchinson was a schoolmate, a beautiful brother with a sunshine disposition. Easy-going brother, help-you-out brother, fun-to-be-with brother. Eliot wasn’t a gangster and Eliot wasn’t a bully. Eliot was cool people. Eliot got along with everyone, growing up with all of us, dancing, playing sports, joking, doing his homework, and living his life. Then tragedy struck. Eliot got a brain tumor and, just like that, cancer consumed him. Eliot died.
I’ll never forget Eliot’s funeral. The level of grief was extraordinary. The pain on his parents’ faces is something that still lives with me. The wailing, the crying out to God, the casket in the ground. Death came home to Glen Elder. Death took Eliot. And I couldn’t help but wonder—Why not me? Who gets to live and who gets to die? I had no answers. Wasn’t enough to say, God is in charge and we can’t understand or question God. Jesus was real and Jesus was love, but why couldn’t Jesus’s love have kept Eliot alive? The fact that my friend fell without warning or reason haunted me. Eliot’s death seemed so absurd it created a surd—a gaping hole—in my understanding of life. It excited a certain panic in my way of thinking and feeling. It sucked all the meaning and rich sublimity out of being alive. It had me fixated on this dead-end notion of nonexistence. For the first time, I understood that most common of expressions—I’m scared to death.
Yet I cannot characterize myself as a frightened child. As fascinated as I was by death, I was still deeply in love with life as it was lived in the black neighborhoods of Sacramento, California in the fifth and sixth decades of the twentieth century. I was deeply in love with life because I was deeply in love with music and girls and sports. I can’t overemphasize the role of sports. Because both Dad and Cliff were superb athletes, I was inclined to excel as well. I had no compunctions or conflicts about running out on the baseball diamond, putting on a glove, and fielding those hot grounders to second base until I absolutely perfected my double-play move. In fact, my father, along with our neighbors—other black men involved in their sons’ lives—built those diamonds with their own hands and organized our leagues themselves.
But how did the fiery passion for competitive sport and its breakneck energy coexist within the soul of a boy preoccupied with questions of mortality?
CURVE BALLS
THE IMAGES COME AT ME like curve balls. They do not arrive straight over the plate. They twist, they drop, they change direction. They hop, skip, and jump all over the place …
I’m running. I’m born to run. I’m following in my brother’s footsteps—I’ll never catch Cliff or match his achievements—but I’m running nonetheless. Coach says I have talent in the two-mile and I’m starting to win meets here and there. The schedule is crazy. Dad gets us up and we run five miles.
Earlier in my life, I was running back home, grabbing my bike and heading out to throw my paper route. I threw the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sacramento Union, and the Sacramento Bee. I was bicycling like a madman ’cause the dogs were waiting for me. Man, the dogs were mean. The Rottweilers, the Dobermans, the angry-hungry-killer-foaming-at-the-mouth mongrels going after me like I’m their sure-enough breakfast. After school, I was still running, running to my piano lessons. My teacher, Mrs. Crawley, said I had talent and a good shot to get into the junior orchestra. I felt a natural affinity for the classics. Loved me some Beethoven. Loved me some Mozart. Kept practicing—played violin as well—and even made it as first violin concert maestro, winning a statewide competition against some of the baddest kids in San Francisco and L.A.
Man, I’m running.
Running hard. Still trying to catch Cliff.
Cliff is a champion athlete. Cliff has aspirations to be the first black man to break the four-minute mile. Cliff and Dad take me to the backyard—there’s lots of land and empty lots in the suburbs of Glen Elder—and teach me baseball. Comes naturally. Even develop a curve ball.
“That’s a mean curve you got, bro,” says Cliff. “The thing just falls off the table. Keep working and no one will be able to touch that thing.”
I keep working. Mrs. Reed’s sons—Raymond and Duane—are my constant playmates who help me hone my skills. My pitch gets meaner. Batters keep falling. At age 8, I strike out every twelve-year-old in sight. At age twelve, the sixteen-year-olds can’t touch me. Cliff and Dad put me at second base.
“No one’s got eye-hand coordination like you, Corn,” says Cliff. “You can make it to the majors if you wanna.”
I just wanna keep running. Coaches encourage me. Dad and Cliff keep pushing me on. When the rainstorms come and I can’t run or play ball outside, Cliff and I make up little imaginary baseball leagues using yellow pencils as bats and toothpaste caps as balls. We invent track meets using dice to get the runners going.
Dad’s running us to San Francisco’s Candlestick Park to see our heroes, Willie Mays and Willie McCovey and Hal Lanier, my role model as a second baseman. These are Giants.
“My boys are giants,” says Dad. “Giants in spirit. My boys have the hearts of lions.”
I’m going. I’m running. Mom is running to teach at school every day, brimming with enthusiasm for teaching the young kids to read. Every night before we go to bed she’s reading us poetry. I’m reading about Teddy Roosevelt who went to Harvard—hey, that gives me an idea: I wanna go to Harvard—and I’m relating to Teddy because, although he’s running throughout his life, he loses his breath, like me. We both suffer with asthma.
Asthma is frightening. Like the bridge over jagged rocks and the Rottweiler looking to bite off my backside, asthma threatens my life by cutting off my breath. Gotta stop. Can’t run. Start choking. Start panicking. Hate it when the asthma hits. The asthma keeps me from moving on. It’s keeping me from gaining ground. It’s got that death shudder falling all over me. What am I going to do about the asthma?
Orange, Texas. One hundred degrees in the shade. We’re visiting Mom’s people. I’m waking up in the middle of the night, choking, feeling close to death’s door. Cliff wakes up with me, gets me a glass of water, helps me catch my breath. But I see the fear in his eyes. I see the fear in Mom’s eyes the next morning when I get an asthma attack at breakfast.
At sundown, Cliff and I take a little jog around the neighborhood, just to stay in shape. I’m feeling a little better, but the lack of breath is always on my mind. We stop at a little convenience store to get some Kool-Aid.
“You seem to be breathing okay, bro,” says Cliff.
“For now,” I say, “but that asthma thing ain’t going away.”
A sister buying white bread overhears our conversation. She’s a middle-aged woman with a kindly air about her.
“If you suffer from asthma, son,” she says, “you best pay a visit to Madam Marie.”
“Who’s Madam Marie?” I ask.
“She’s got some remedies.”
“What kind of remedies?” Cliff wants to know.
“She can explain them,” says the kindly woman. “I can’t. All I know is they work.”
“She a God-fearing lady?” asks Cliff. “She a Christian?”
“She’s different. I’ll give you her address. If you decide to go by, say Miss Johnson sent you. She saved my boy when he was just about your age.”
That night Cliff and I tell Big Daddy, Mom’s father, what happened. Remember—Big Daddy is a deacon at the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church.
“That’s a voodoo lady,” says Big Daddy. “No grandson of mine’s gonna have nothing to do with no voodoo lady.”
“What’s voodoo, Big Daddy?” I ask.
“It don’t come out of the Scriptures,” he answers. “Ain’t got nothing to do with what we believe.”
That night Cliff and I
talk it over.
“Hate to go against what Big Daddy says,” I reflect, “but this asthma thing is getting no better. None of the regular treatments work. You think the voodoo can hurt me, Cliff?”
“I’ll come along with you to make sure it doesn’t.”
Madam Marie is a big woman who lives in a little one-room shack. She’s got strange things hanging from the ceiling—roots and peppers and beads. I tell her that Miss Johnson sent me.
“I see you don’t breathe right,” she says even before I explain my ailment.
“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
“I have a cure.”
“How much will it cost?” asks Cliff with a hint of skepticism in his voice.
“If you got a little money, that’s fine. But money or not, baby, I’m giving you the cure.”
With that, Madam Marie gets up, takes a pair of scissors, and cuts a big tuft of hair from the back of my scalp. She leaves me looking something like a monk.
“Follow me, son,” she says.
Cliff and I follow her down an alley to where a long fence separates us from an open field. She stands me in front of the fence. Then she takes the tuft of hair she has cut, gathers it together with a rubber band, and glues it to the fence.
“Stand up straight,” she says.
I stand straight and listen as she speaks words that I don’t understand. A whole lot of conjuring goes on. She removes the hair and speaks some new words, just as incomprehensible as the first ones. I remain standing for several minutes. The tuft is placed back on the fence. I look out of the corner of my eye and see Cliff looking as if to say, “These folks are clean out of their minds!”
“Bless you, son,” says Madam Marie. “You’ll never have problems breathing again.”
And I never have.
I didn’t delve deeper into the mysteries of voodoo. I didn’t question Madam Marie and I didn’t try to explain what happened to anyone. In fact, when I got back to Big Daddy and he saw my bald spot and heard what happened, I caught hell. Always protective of me, Cliff tried to take the blame and said, “It was my idea.” But I told the truth and said it was my decision.
As the days and weeks and months went by, as I found myself free of even the smallest sign of an asthma problem, I was not tempted to abandon the love ethos of Christianity for voodooist practices. I did, however, see myself moving in a more ecumenical direction. I began to understand that answers to problems— physical, emotional, and spiritual—often require enquiries that go beyond the confines of a narrow dogma.
As to why the conjuring worked, I still have no idea.
OUR SUMMERS IN TEXAS AND OKLAHOMA were important times. These were, after all, the territories of my immediate origin, places where the countrified nature of my people—and of me—was nurtured. Just as much as California, Texas, and Oklahoma represented home.
The home of Grandma Lovie in Tulsa was especially impressive. As a result of her catering skill, she was a good earner who put her money into interior décor. Her house was immaculate. The silver was polished, the linen freshly laundered, her upholstered furniture spotless. I loved being there. Grandma gave me a feeling of well-being, not only because her beautifully appointed home offered security—the security that results from achievement against all odds—but because she was also deeply charitable. She fed the poor and cared for the downtrodden.
Yet she was also stern. When, for example, I disobeyed her by climbing a tree in her backyard and breaking a branch, she angered quickly.
“Get me a switch from the tree, boy.”
She took the switch and struck me. As the blow came down, I turned. That’s when Grandma Lovie inadvertently caught the side of my eye with the switch. It stung like crazy and left a permanent scar. If I had turned a fraction of an inch more, I might have lost the eye. Grandma Lovie cried out in remorse. “Lord Jesus!” she said, “I didn’t mean to do that.” For the rest of my life she never stopped apologizing.
COACH COULDN’T STOP APOLOGIZING. I understand that it wasn’t his fault, but, on some fundamental level, I remained shocked. This is another childhood blow that became clear years later. I’ll explain in a minute.
I was barely a teen. I was committed, like Brother Cliff, to becoming a champion runner. I was swept up by the Shiloh Baptist sermons of Reverend Cooke. I was swept up by the sounds of Jr. Walker’s “Shotgun.” I was slow-dancing with the girls to Barbara Mason’s “Yes, I’m Ready” and Smokey Robinson’s “Choosey Beggar.” In fact, some of the girls told me I looked a little like Smokey. I was also into Arthur Schopenhauer, the German thinker born 220 years ago who said that art was more important than reason or logic in understanding life. Man, I related. I knew that Marvin Gaye’s “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” was more than just a song. When the Impressions sang about “Keep on Pushing” and “People Get Ready,” their words, like Schopenhauer’s or Kierkegaard’s, resonated deep within me. When Mom and Dad had taken us to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. speak at Sacramento’s Memorial Auditorium—that was back in 1963 when I was ten—I was spellbound. I felt him. I felt it. I felt the rhythm of righteous speech. He was, like a song, pushing us on.
Early at Will C. Wood Junior High, the teachers were pushing me on. While I made the varsity baseball team as a seventh grader and won the Inspirational Trophy in football, I also was reading biographies of Albert Einstein and fell in love with the fact that, for all his scientific brilliance, he played the violin. Just for the heck of it, I started writing books. At twelve, I wrote a 250-page history of Canada. At thirteen, I wrote a 180-page history of Mexico City. These were not books of any insight or analysis. They were simple accumulations of facts placed in chronological order and rendered in storytelling form.
I was running, running, running.
“You were running so hard,” Cliff recently reminded me, “that you once got into my stash. I’m not sure I was such a good role model for you, Corn. I might have had Dad’s cool, but Dad never used his cool to seduce women. He was a one-woman man. He knew about what the psychologists would later call ‘healthy boundaries.’ But man, I used that cool for all it was worth. And it was worth a lot of girls. They dug that cool. Fact is, there were several girlfriends I was juggling at the same time when, out of nowhere, still another one popped up. We’ll call her ‘V.’ I said, ‘Corn, if V calls, tell her I’m not home.’ Sure enough, V called and you gave her my message. But then you started chatting her up. Next thing I know, bro, you’re going out with V!”
“But no, Cliff. That happened only after you broke up with her.”
V was definitely ghetto fabulous.
COACH BILL MAHAN LOVED THE West brothers. He was our biggest booster and our cross country coach. When Dad couldn’t take us running, Coach would show up at six am and take us on ten-mile treks. Coach had gone to Stanford, where he earned a master’s degree in history. He was a progressive white brother. At one point, he gave me Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a novel that introduced me to the horrors suffered by workers exploited by unchecked capitalism. Coach and I discussed it for days.
“Here’s another book,” he said, giving me Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “You’ll hate it, Corn, but I think it’s important that you read it.”
I didn’t hate it.
“Why not?” asked Coach. “I was sure you’d hate the stereotypes.”
“I saw Tom as somehow trying to be Christ-like,” I said.
Recognizing my voracious appetite for the written word, Coach gave me books far beyond my reading grade level, such as the renowned American historian Richard Hofstadter, who wrote about anti-intellectualism from a subtle progressive perspective. A lifetime later, my first public lecture would take place in the classroom of Coach Mahan—turned Professor Mahan—at Sacramento City College. The topic? Hofstadter’s classic treatment of anti-intellectualism.
Back when I was still a kid, Coach was also determined to teach me how to swim.
“It’ll increase your strength,” Coach said, “and help your stamina whe
n you run. There’s a swimming pool in the apartment complex where I live. We can practice there.”
When we arrived, the pool was being used by a half-dozen white people. I didn’t pay them any mind. I was dead-set on learning to swim. But the moment Coach and I got in the pool, every last swimmer got out. I mean, those folks fled! I looked at Coach and Coach looked at me. I didn’t understand it. I had showered that morning and brushed my teeth. What was going on here? No matter. Coach gave me my lesson, and an hour later we got out. While we were leaving, maintenance arrived and began to drain the pool.
“Why are you doing this?” Coach asked indignantly.
“The manager just told me to clean out the pool.”
“Is this when you usually do it?”
“No. It’s not due for a draining for another week.”
“Did the manager tell you to wait to drain until after we got out?”
“Yes.”
With that, Coach went in and told the manager that he was moving out of the complex. “You hurt me,” he told the manager, “and you hurt my student. You should hang your head in shame.”
NEGATIVE CAPABILITY
I HAVE A LIFELONG LOVE for John Keats, the greatest of the English Romantic poets who lived during the nineteenth century. His uncanny ability to create beauty with words touched my soul. I was still quite young when I read the letter Keats sent to his brother in 1817. In it, he wrote about “negative capability,” which he explained as the quality “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I was drawn to this idea because so much of what I experienced as a kid, teen, and young man seemed shrouded in mystery.
Even the basic story that had been passed down from my grandparents to my parents to me was clearly mysterious. If I read a biography, for example, of Theodore Roosevelt, I was told where he was and what he did every year of his life. But the four biblical accounts of Jesus’s life don’t do that. The narrative is sketchy, the vast majority of his growing-up years undocumented. At times, Jesus expresses uncertainties and doubts. In the Garden of Gethsemane he falls to the ground and wants to know if God will let him out of this jam. On the cross, he cries out that worrying blues line, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
