by Cornel West
At age twenty-two, I wanted to act on the stage of life. I still do. I wanted to do, and dance, and sing a simple song. The simple song was about death and rage and love and music and ideas of justice and freedom. The song had to include the distractions and disruptions but, to be effective, it had to be simple because the blues are simple. Yet, at the same time, as B.B. King, King of the Blues, once wrote, “The blues are a mystery, and mysteries are never as simple as they look.”
So here’s how my life looked in the mid- ’70s:
I was sad over breaking up with Mary, glad about being at Harvard, and, in spite of my usual eager get-ahead-get-the-degree attitude, getting nowhere on my dissertation. Those Russian novelists kept calling me. I even started a literary salon devoted to reading those texts. I had a crib on 888 Massachusetts Avenue where my partners and I discussed a different Russian novel every week. Man, was I obsessed! Didn’t want no English novels and didn’t want no German novels. Forget Proust and Joyce. Later for Cervantes and Victor Hugo. I’m not saying those writers didn’t turn out books we’ll be reading for centuries to come. But I just didn’t want to read them or re-read them in 1975. I had to have Turgenev every dang time. When it came to plays, my man was Anton Chekhov, whose understanding of the human condition is rivaled only by Shakespeare and Sophocles. Chekhov is the deep blues poet of catastrophe and compassion, whose stories lovingly depict everyday people wrestling with the steady ache of misery and yearning for a better life. As I grew older, only Franz Kafka inhabited the same literary stratosphere as Chekhov.
Others in our literary salon in Cambridge got tired of my Russian-only policy and made me stretch out. Ultimately we let in a little James Baldwin. We got to a little Ralph Ellison and we couldn’t ignore Brother Richard Wright. The only non-black non-Russian whose work we analyzed was Thomas Pynchon. We devoted a chunk of time to The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow.
The literary salon had an impact on me beyond the books we read. It was during this period that I toyed with the idea of becoming a writer—a serious novelist. In fact, I started an ambitious novel that, if it found form, would contain all my philosophical musings in dramatic fashion. I toiled on the book, looking to the Russians for literary inspiration and to the transcendent corpus of Mahalia Jackson, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, and Stephen Sondheim for musical inspiration.
Of course, I was also teaching. Won’t ever forget my first day as a teaching assistant for a course taught by Stanley Cavell, one of the philosophical geniuses of our time, and Martha Nussbaum, a young creative classical philosopher. Martha was brand-new on the Harvard faculty while Stanley had been there for twenty years. He was a Wittgenstein man, but the brother could teach anything from “Antigone” to the films of Fred Astaire. When I entered the classroom, two students were already there. “You better bring in more chairs ’cause this is a popular class,” they told me. They presumed I was the janitor.
“Cool,” I said. I went and got more chairs, waited for the others students to file in and then went to the lectern and started teaching. The young brothers nearly died. They fell over themselves apologizing. “Hey, man,” I said, “we all got our stereotypes.” We wound up being friends.
MY DEAREST FRIEND IN GRADUATE SCHOOL was Brother Larry Morse, the last of the Renaissance men. His novel, The Sundial, is the best literary depiction of life at Howard University. Larry is also a trained economist and one of the finest minds in American business. Through Larry, I met Henry Coleman, who happened to be teaching economics at Tufts. “Corn,” Henry said, “you got to meet this sister who’s running the black house at Tufts.”
Turned out her name was Hilda Holloman, and, believe me, Brother Henry was right. Hilda was off the hook. Brilliant woman, beautiful woman, loving woman, seriously Christian woman with a highly developed critique of Christian dogma. She’d gone to Spelman as an undergraduate and was the first black woman to be working on a Ph.D. in philosophy from Tufts. She was writing papers on Descartes.
Tufts is just down the road from Harvard, and it didn’t take long for us to meet. The connection was instantaneous. We had worlds in common. She’d come to the philosophy classes that I was conducting as a teaching fellow; she became part of our literary salon. Soon she became part of my life, night and day. Hilda had a singular style and wonderfully supple mind. We could talk all night. And then some nights we didn’t need to talk at all. I saw my future, at least my domestic future, as having everything to do with the fabulous Hilda Holloman.
There was an excitement in my relationship with Hilda where the sexual, intellectual, and spiritual all came together. She and I met in 1975, and on January 1, 1977, we married at her parents’ home in Atlanta. Brother Cliff was my best man. Mom also flew in, but my father and sisters didn’t make it—the cost of travel was too much.
It was a beautiful wedding. I saw a beautiful future. I saw children and I saw domestic stability. I saw myself settling down into a long and loving relationship with one woman and one home, much as my Mom and Dad had created in my childhood home.
Another beautiful thing happened. I’d been offered a job at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, one of the finest such institutions in the world. There was no place I’d have rather been. Union is the oldest nondenominational seminary in the country. The finest theological minds had taught there, including Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. The Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer had studied there before being martyred by the Nazis in World War II. So had Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Black liberation theology, as expressed in the work of the incomparable James Cone, blossomed at Union.
So when Union offered me a teaching job with the understanding that I’d complete my Ph.D. thesis, long overdue at Princeton, within a few months, I accepted. Man, I jumped at the chance. For a prophetic Christian like me, Union was as close to academic heaven as I was ever going to get. Hilda was willing to make the shift from Tufts to Columbia graduate school, where she could continue her philosophy studies. Meanwhile, our child was due that August.
How well I remember arriving in New York in September to start my job at Union’s facility on 122nd Street. I was blessed to be offered the office of Reinhold Niebuhr, the spiritual volcano and intellectual hurricane of his time. The room was immaculate and the desk was bare except for two letters addressed to me.
The first was from Professor Nathan A. Scott, Jr. of the University of Chicago. My black brother, Nathan, was the leading religious scholar of modern literature, a former student of Niebuhr and a Ph.D. from Union and Columbia. When I was in graduate school, I had attended his Noble lectures at Harvard on my favorite contemporary English poet, W.H. Auden. I was so inspired, I asked him whether we could have a cup of coffee and keep talking. The professor was gracious enough to say that, although he had plans that evening, he would meet me the next morning at six o’clock in Harvard Square. I was there at 5:45 am, eager to pursue our discussion. Professor Scott arrived with a smile, and we talked for hours. Now, looking at his letter on the desk, I had to wonder what was on his mind.
It turned out to be a heartfelt warning. Nathan was convinced that I was making the mistake of my life. According to his perspective, the Golden Age of Union was over and the school had been taken over by leftists. I put down the letter with a sigh.
The other envelope had a return address from Drew University. It was from George Kelsey, the renowned Christian ethicist. Kelsey was the first black professor to teach religion in a predominantly white university. He had taught Martin Luther King, Jr. at Morehouse. Like Dr. King, Kelsey was shaped by the godfather of all twentieth-century black religious scholars, Howard Thurman. “Dear Professor West,” wrote Kelsey. “Words cannot express my delight at your appointment at the historic Union Seminary. May God bless you as you keep alive a rich Christian heritage.”
Later that day, I felt compelled to make a neighborhood pilgrimage that included two stops. The first was to the home of Lionel Trilling, a giant among the public intellectuals of his day. The second
was to the home of Ralph Ellison, the grand novelist of his generation. I made this sacred trek with my newborn son in my arms.
Nothing thrilled me more than the birth of Cliff on August 9, 1977. He carried the name of my brother and father and grandfather. What a blessing to have a son! And how wonderful, back in 1973, to have a nephew—my brother Cliff’s son—named after me. Cornel, alongside Erika, Phillip, Phyllis, Kahnie, and Briana, have made me the proudest uncle in late modernity. Just as later in life my grandson Kalen and my godchildren Brian, Ruby, Emma, and Langston bring joy to my heart. My son Cliff’s lovely wooden cradle was given to us by the celebrated freedom fighters Robert and Janet Moses. I had met Robert in Cambridge when he returned to Harvard from Tanzania to complete his Ph.D. in philosophy. I viewed this brother as the most courageous and compassionate leader in the Civil Rights Movement, with the sole exceptions of Martin Luther King, Jr., Ella Baker, Stokely Carmichael, and Fannie Lou Hamer. His Algebra Project, which teaches poor young people mathematics as a form of literacy and cultural liberation, operates to this day from Cambridge, Massachusetts, with branches across the country. I loved putting Cliff to sleep in this cradle that symbolized the intergenerational struggle for freedom.
Robert Moses is one kind of spiritual colossus. At Union, I was about to embark on an adventure with another spiritual giant, a man whose friendship would sustain me for two tumultuous decades to come.
BROTHER WASH
WE MADE QUITE A PAIR. Wash looked like James Cleveland after the picnic. And I looked like an undernourished Smokey Robinson.
Wash was James Melvin Washington, ordained preacher and Professor of Church History at Union. He was unique. Big man, big heart, big intellect. Wash came out Knoxville, where he grew up materially poor and spiritually rich in the Baptist tradition. He’d been a boy preacher who got the calling early—at sixteen he was leading the 126-member Riverview Missionary Baptist Church in Lenoir City, Tennessee—and spread the Word every single Sunday of his life. After graduating from the University of Tennessee, Jim was accepted into Harvard Divinity School, where he earned a master’s in theology. Then on to Yale, where he wound up with two more degrees, including a Ph.D. He’d been teaching at Yale when Union called him down to New York. I’d met Wash years before in Cambridge, but we didn’t tighten up until we hooked up at Union. From then on, we were inseparable.
I loved the man for many reasons. Some folk have a spark of divinity—from time to time you can see the Jesus in them. Wash didn’t have a spark—he had a fire that warmed everyone he met. You saw the Jesus in him as clearly as you saw his dark loving eyes. For all his extraordinary erudition, Jim Washington was first and foremost a down-home brother who never—not for an instant— betrayed his country roots. Fact is, he was countrified as cornbread, and yet could delineate the most complex theology text with the precision of a surgeon. His mind was amazing. I related to him as I have related to few other men. After Cliff, Jim became my closest friend in life. Perhaps the thing that brought us closest together was the way in which he married his deep Baptist faith to his vast intellectual sophistication. In other words, for all his Socratic questioning and powerful curiosity, for everything he had learned about every conceivable theological system, for all his understanding of the metaphysical subtleties of religious thought, he still believed in the Jesus of his mama and his mama’s mama. He still called that Jesus real, still prayed to that Jesus, still preached Jesus’s love every chance he had.
For both me and Brother Wash, following Jesus requires a radical child-like sense of faith and wonder, and a mature effort to pick up our cross and bear the cost. This is not to be confused with a childish dogmatism that trumps mystery or a will to power that celebrates worldly success at the expense of spiritual integrity. For us, Constantinian Christianity produces people well-adjusted to injustice and well-adapted to indifference. Prophetic Christianity produces people maladjusted to greed, indifference, and fear. We vowed to love our crooked neighbors with our crooked hearts. We believe that if the kingdom of God is within us, then everywhere we go we should leave a little heaven behind.
Jim called Dr. King his contemporary religious hero. He looked to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power as inspirations and said that he “discovered in existentialism a certain secular celebration of the inevitability of marginality.” He called “spiritual malaise the root cause of the social callousness that has befallen too many segments of African America.” And we both considered Karl Barth the grand Christian theologian of the twentieth century.
The central question with which Jim grappled was unjustified suffering—the problem of evil. Why would a benevolent, all-knowing and all-powerful God permit such pain on any people? He and I didn’t approach the dilemma theoretically, however. In the end, we saw the answer as the conclusion of a practical Aristotelian syllogism. It was all about action. It was all about the practice of faith. As in the novels of Dostoyevsky, your life becomes your response. Your response doesn’t take the form of a written-down, reasoned-out argument. Your response becomes the quality of your day-to-day behavior. The question doesn’t go away. It remains powerful and daunting. But the fact that there is no reasoned-out answer doesn’t turn you cynical. You live with the reality that the question remains, a challenge to your mind and your heart. You can’t bring back the bodies that died in the Atlantic Ocean during the slave trade. You can’t reconcile a tidal wave wiping out an entire city with the notion of a sovereign God. You can’t equate catastrophe with the human condition—but you can, following the teachings of this particular Palestinian Jew, do what you can to help the least among us.
For Christians, serious faith begins when we experience the sweet shipwreck of the mind and the bittersweet cracking open of the heart. As George Santayana noted, “Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.”
Both Wash and I shared a Christian worldview that conformed to what we saw as here-and-now reality. To be human is to call for help. We saw birth itself as a catastrophe: you’re thrown in space and time to die. The flesh fails. Then the question becomes simple—how you gonna cope? Life is shot through with contradictions and incongruities. But that doesn’t mean that any ol’ life is acceptable. On the contrary, it means there’s a big distance between a holy fool and unholy fool. Robin Hood and Alexander the Great were both gangsters, but consider the difference between them. As the Reverend Al Green once preached in his “Love Sermon,” that’s the distance “from heaven to earth.”
The intellectual rigor that Wash brought to bear on his Christianity—together with the tremendous historical and theological knowledge accumulated during a lifetime of disciplined study—was inspiring. Appropriately, his classic text is Conversations with God: Two Centuries of Prayers by African Americans. Covering some 235 years, the prayers selected by Wash begin in 1760. He has the sensitivity to recognize the most spiritual words uttered by our people. Jim never placed the mind above the heart—not in the prayers he picked, not in the life he led—and the book remains by my bedside, even to this day. It reminds me of the good times spent with Wash, his beloved wife Patricia, and his lovely daughter Ayanna.
Wash and I had a special bond. When we arrived at Union, we had both been told by white men in authority that we would never gain tenure. We didn’t believe them for a minute. Wash and I promised each other that Union would have no choice but to tenure us. We would out-write, out-publish, and out-shine anyone in the country.
There was a third brother in our triumvirate, Jim Forbes. Together, we were the Three Musketeers of Union Theological Seminary.
The Reverend Dr. James Alexander Forbes, Jr. was not only a distinguished professor of preaching at Union, he became the first black Senior Minister at the Riverside Church on the Upper West Side of New York City. This is the magnificent gothic church, the tallest in America, built by John D. Rockefeller in 1927. It’s interdenominational— Baptist and United Church of Christ—and
known for its progressive policies. When they installed Brother Forbes, though, they’d never heard preaching like that before. Jim was called the “preacher’s preacher” for good reason. No one could touch his eloquence. No one could dispute his scholarship. He expressed the mystery and magnificence of Christ’s abiding love in a way that broke down color lines, political differences, and economic barriers. When it comes to giving the Good Word, Jim has the big gift.
Riverside had always been a bastion of white liberal Christianity. Before Forbes, William Sloane Coffin had been Senior Minister. He was another giant. Yes, indeed. Brother Coffin was the man who said, “The devil’s always suggesting we compromise our high calling by substituting the good in place of the best.” Brother Coffin liked to suggest that it’s the devil in every American that makes us feel good about living in a country so powerful. Love of country is fine, but why should love stop at the border? Brother Coffin was quick to say that we’re all capable of the extraordinary. His formulation was that extraordinary people are ordinary people who do ordinary things extraordinarily well. Coming from an extraordinarily rich family, he gave up much to become a preacher. At the same time, as the predecessor to Forbes, Coffin embodied many of the typical positive characteristics of a white liberal Christian.
Forbes, though, had been a lifelong Pentecostal. He had to become a Baptist before assuming the senior pastor role. He did so, even as he retained the passion of his original faith. When his graceful wife Bettye and son James and I use to see him up there in that high pulpit, among the European architectural ornamentation of that church, preaching in his own poetical style, it was a beautiful thing. When we hooked up in 1977, Brother Forbes was forty-two, Brother Wash was twenty-nine, and I was twenty-four. In fact, I was the youngest person to be appointed a professor in Union history—and I still hadn’t written my Ph.D. thesis.
