Brother West

by Cornel West

  Hilda reminded me of my neglect. It bothered her to no end, and I can understand why. In her mind, instead of running off to these academic conferences, I should have been concentrating on getting that degree. My energy, though, was focused on being an active member of this Union faculty, at the time the most prestigious gathering of black religious scholars in the country. Their company thrilled me. Their conversation inspired me. I knew I was where I needed to be, reading and teaching. My mind was growing, my understanding of the black spiritual experience being broadened by the mere fact of spending so much time with these men.

  I remember going with my colleagues to a conference at Yale. It was a big-time gathering of the most celebrated theologians in the world. When I walked into that hall with my brothers—James Cone, Jim Washington, and Jim Forbes—man, I felt like we were the Dramatics walking on stage at the Apollo. We were the Spinners. We were the Temptations at the top of their game.

  Back in New York, I was also teaching at the prophetic Reverend Herbert Daughtry’s House of the Lord Pentecostal Church in Brooklyn. We had a Timbuktu Learning Center—led by Charles Barron, A.G. Miller, Reverend Clarence Brown, and Karen Daughtry—where I taught the community folk something of the history of Christianity. This commitment, which continued for years, was especially important. It was during those lectures that I realized I could abandon my notes. In fact, using notes hindered my ad-lib style and my ability to riff. It wasn’t until the early ’80s, when I taught at Haverford College, that I found the confidence to speak without notes in an academic context. I’ve been freestyling ever since.

  Meanwhile, 1978 came around, and this Negro still wasn’t producing nothing. By the end of the year, Union was saying, “Brother West, we’re giving you one more year, and if that blessed thesis of yours isn’t written, you’re out.”

  Hilda got more uncomfortable.

  “Just sit down and write the thing,” she said.

  “Were it that easy, baby,” I said. “I’m not feeling it right now.”

  “Well, make yourself feel it, Corn.”

  “It don’t work that way.”

  “How about our future and our child’s future? The way you’re procrastinating, it’s hard for me to believe that you’re ever going to take care of business.”

  Hilda had every reason to register her anxiety. To her credit, she was always emotionally honest with me and let me know that, as a provider, I wasn’t thinking the way I should have been thinking. What was I thinking? Well, I was always thinking of kicking it with Wash. Wash was my man. We had non-stop all-day all-night rap sessions, running down everything from the works of Toni Morrison to Plato’s Republic. Wasn’t nothing Wash didn’t know.

  Meanwhile, I was up to my neckbone in politics and philosophy. I was writing for and attending the biweekly meetings of Social Text, a leading left-wing journal led by Fredric Jameson, Stanley Aronowitz, Richard Wolfe, Stephen Bronner, and Sonya Sayres. I was working on Boundary 2, the first postmodern journal the country had ever seen, headed by the grand critic William Spanos, whose deep love for America’s greatest writer, Herman Melville, I share.

  I was contributing to the leading Marxist journal, Monthly Review, led by the legendary political economists Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff.

  I was also working with Edward Said. Edward was an uncompromising and inspiring humanist, a professor at Columbia and a towering public intellectual of late-twentieth-century America. As a Palestinian American, he was an absolute original. I cherished his friendship. I also cherished the time I spent sitting at the feet of the world-changing Pan-African scholar and activist Professor John Henrik Clarke.

  I also was an early participant in the seminal Society for the Study of Africana Philosophy, headed by Howard McGary, Al Prettyman, Lucius Outlaw, Leonard Harris, and Bill Lawson. John Rajchman and I co-edited Post-Analytic Philosophy, a highly influential text that’s still in use today.

  And as if that was not enough, I attended monthly meetings of the Columbia University religion group led by Peter Finch, Wayne Proudfoot, John Cuddihy, and Hans Jonas. I also participated in the renowned Yale theological group headed by Hans Frei, David Kelsey, and George Lindbeck. And I was a part of the Process Theology group led by my brothers John Cobb, Schubert Ogden, and David Griffith. And at the point of near exhaustion, I was deeply immersed in the Columbus Circle of American Literary Scholars led by my dear brothers Sacvan Bercovitch, Werner Sollors, and Quentin Anderson.

  Man, was I ever ripping and running in the life of the mind, not only smitten with ideas but absolutely overwhelmed with intellectual curiosity!

  I CHERISHED MY FAMILY—my dear wife Hilda and our precious son Cliff—but the husband-wife relationship had reached a point of no return. Hilda wanted more stability. My career path—if, in fact, I had a career path at all—was too circuitous. She could not support my intellectual wanderings. She wanted to move back to be near her family in Georgia and take Cliff with her. Had to face the fact: This dream of mine, this idea that, like Mom and Dad, my marriage would last a lifetime had come to an abrupt end. My marriage wouldn’t last three years. Rough stuff.

  When it was time to leave, Cliff clung to me like his life depended on it. He kept crying, “Daddy! Don’t go, Daddy!” I went, crying along with my son.

  I was painfully torn between my responsibilities as a dad and my calling as an intellectual bluesman. The torment of this civil war inside my soul would darken and shorten my days.

  The blues took on new meaning. Like the song said, “Blues too deep to go away. These blues, man, they here to stay.”

  MOONLIGHT

  OVER MANHATTAN

  THERE WERE CERTAIN DANGERS INVOLVED in sleeping in Central Park in 1979. Crime was still on the rise. But there were certain spots, between the thick grove of trees and lush expansive lawns, where I could spread out my blanket, rest my weary head, look up at the heavens and, regardless of the crazy circumstances that brought me here, enjoy some peace of mind.

  The summer weather was mild and the night breeze cool. The air was clear. The moon was full, the sky flooded with stars. My mind was flooded with thoughts.

  How in the name of reason had I wound up here?

  When I got my Reno divorce from Hilda, the judge saw I was making $503 a month and told me to give her $383. That meant I had $117 to work with or, to break it down further, $29.25 a week.

  In my head, I kept hearing Johnnie Taylor singin’ ’bout, “It’s cheaper to keep her.”

  Brother, I got the blues.

  When we split up, even before Hilda went to Atlanta, I gave her the apartment we were renting. That meant I had no place of my own. When I started looking for a place, the security and first month’s rent were more than I could handle. Rather than hit on friends for a loan, I figured it might do me good to relax in the great outdoors until I could plan my next move.

  When it came to money planning, I didn’t do well. I didn’t want to fight with my ex-wife who was the prime caretaker of our beloved son. I didn’t want to fight with anyone. At the same time, by giving her practically everything and keeping little for myself, I set a pattern that would last for … well, maybe forever.

  On those two nights, out there on the grass of Central Park, cuddled up in my sleeping bag, there were times when I had to laugh. Here I was, graduate of Harvard and Princeton, student of philosophy, lover of literature, professor-on-the-rise, and broke as the Ten Commandments. Now ain’t that something. Maybe it was then when the bluesman shuffle started playing inside my brain. Maybe it was then when I heard the rhythm, the rhyme of the song, the stars overhead spelling out the story: Your baby’s gone. Your money’s funny. You ain’t got no home. Nobody loves you but your mama and—as B.B. King says—“she could be jivin’, too.”

  But, oh, never never my loving and loyal mama, B.B.! She is my rock forever! There’s humor in those statements. There’s pain. That’s the comic tragedy of the blues. You tease the situation for what it’s worth. You comfort yourse
lf with a joke a two. You close your eyes and hope no one mugs you during the night. You wake up and move on—teaching at Union, putting a few bucks together to rent a little place uptown. See what happens next.

  ONE OF THE BIG BOOKS OF 1979 was Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman by Michele Wallace. I read it and loved it. I viewed it as a brilliant and brave critique of black nationalism and black sexism. Back in 1973, Michele and her mom—the celebrated and innovative artist Faith Ringgold—had been founding members of the National Black Feminist Organization. I knew that Michele had come out of the heavy-duty intellectual climate of New York’s City College. I wanted to meet Michele, so I invited her to my class at Union.

  I remember the moment when she walked through the door. The instant I saw her, I said to myself, Lord, have a-mercy! It’s gonna be a thang! And Lord knows it was. Michele was magnificent, a different kind of sister than any I had encountered before. She’d been shaped by the kind of rich but existentially ambiguous subculture of the Jewish intelligentsia. After college, she had gone to the Village Voice, where that same sort of heavyweight cultural environment continued to sharpen her mind. I had met few black women who had emerged from this background. As a writer, thinker, and social critic, Michele was spectacular.

  Our connection was powerful and romantic. Intimacy happened in a hurry. I felt like, This is the woman I’ve been looking for. Michele felt like, This is the man I’ve been looking for. The search was over. The heat was on.

  There was a lot of heat on Michele due to the publication of Black Macho. I traveled around the country with her, listening to her publicize her book and supporting her against an army of black male intellectuals who took her to task. Not that she needed my support. Michele was—and is—perfectly capable of defending herself. But because we had fallen head-over-heels in love, I wanted to be at her side, and besides, I agreed with her critique of rampant sexism in the black community. To tell the truth about patriarchy in black America in 1979 took tremendous courage. Michele had tremendous courage.

  She was under heavy pressure in this period. She was a pioneer, and pioneers often wander into alien territory. As her companion, I was not known. I hadn’t published anything. I was merely her boyfriend. I was, however, attacked in much the way she was being attacked. I was accused of criticizing the black male community. The critique of my critique went something like: Hey, Brother West, aren’t the assaults from the white supremacists on black malehood enough? Do we have to suffer assaults from you as well? Where’s your manhood, Brother West? Where’s your sense of solidarity with your brothers?

  My answer was that sexism, like racism, needs to be called out, and let the chips fall where they may. If anything, going through this ordeal—incurring the wrath of so many bright but, in my view, misdirected brothers—brought Michele and me closer. Soon we were living together. We had great times with Michele’s best friend Jill Nelson and Jill’s brother Stanley. Both Nelsons became significant figures in American culture—Jill as a writer, Stanley as a filmmaker. We also enjoyed frequent visits with the witty, insightful Jerry Watts.

  Because Michele wanted to be close to the Yale campus where she was working on her Ph.D., she and I pooled our meager resources and shared a Greek-style red house in New Haven. I was so eager to spend every night with her that I commuted to New York—driving down every morning so I could teach at Union and driving back up to New Haven every evening. Michele helped me buy a beat-up third-hand Camaro. I was speeding down I-95, making that 90-mile drive twice a day.

  I HAD BEEN PLANNING MY PH.D. thesis for many years. I finally decided the thing had to get done. It was an important work for me, not merely an academic exercise. I say important because it touched on the issues that concerned me most. Before I got to my final thesis, I had already thrown away two separate hundred-page drafts on T.H. Green and the Aristotelian foundations of Marxist ethics. The thesis that got completed, though, was The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought.

  Most people didn’t think Karl Marx had any ethics. They said he was obsessed with the notion of power. But I had read the essay written by seventeen-year-old Karl Marx called “Jesus Christ, Liberator of the World.” Karl’s dad was a Jewish convert who had changed his name from Herschel Mordechai to Heinrich Marx. Heinrich raised his son as a Lutheran. And Karl fell in love with a powerful aspect of Christ—the identification with suffering on the deepest level. In my thesis, I tell the story of how religion shaped Marx’s ethical sensibility before Marx became radically secular. Marxism and Christianity, I argue, are linked in ways that we cannot ignore. One does not cancel out the other. In fact, the rise of liberation theology in Latin America, where concern for the poor is linked to both a political and sacred agenda, is also linked to Marxism. No one, of course, has argued that Jesus wasn’t in solidarity with the poor. Now the question becomes—how do you transform Jesus’s love into social, political, and economic justice in the world today? I argue that Marx carries with him certain relics and remnants of the religious worldview he had embraced as a Lutheran, even as he calls into question the validity of a godhead and becomes an atheist.

  My thesis was accepted and I became the first black person to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton. My sister Cynthia accompanied me to graduation. I shall never forget the lovely party in the famous Tower Room of 1879 Hall sponsored by Professors David Lewis, Thomas Scanlon, Richard Rorty, and Raymond Geuss after my final oral exam. A decade later my thesis—advised by Sheldon—was published in book form. I’m gratified that it’s still in print. It remains a record of what was going through my mind as the ’70s spilled over to the ’80s, a time when Ronald Reagan, our old nemesis from California, had ascended to the presidency. Reagan made it fashionable to be indifferent to the poor and gave permission to be greedy with little or no conscience.

  DURING THIS TIME, MY OWN political activities accelerated. In addition to Sheldon Wolin and Raymond Geuss working on my thesis, two encounters had a tremendous impact on me. The first was my friendship with Stanley Aronowitz, the most enchanting intellectual interlocutor I had ever met. Stanley never stopped reading, never stopped analyzing the crisis of Marxist thought, never stopped pushing me into serious dialogue about the meaning of cultural politics. Both as an activist and thinker, Aronowitz energized my learning process. He and I helped found and taught at the Center for Workers’ Education in New York.

  The second empowering influence was Michael Harrington. In the early ’80s, he formed the Democratic Socialists of America. It was the only multiracial organization whose progressive politics made me comfortable enough to actually join. I use the word “comfortable” cautiously. I had another take on Democratic Socialism, based on the work on Antonio Gramsci. I was a member of DSA, but a highly critical one. Yet Harrington’s humanity and wonderful sense of intellectual generosity allowed competing points of view. I loved Michael and count it a blessing to have toiled in the fields of social change alongside him for many years. In addition, I was fortunate to meet the renowned public intellectual Barbara Ehrenreich, for whom I have deep and abiding respect. After Michael’s death in 1989, she and I became honorary chairpersons of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA.)

  After the completion of my thesis, I got on a writing roll that has never stopped. I put together the lectures I had been delivering in Brooklyn at Reverend Daughtry’s Pentecostal church, added to them and published my first and favorite book, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity. A portion of the book was based on lectures that I delivered in San Jose, Costa Rica. Daughtry, by the way, began and led the National Black United Front. In the early days of Reagan’s national rule, the United Front was one of the only organizations pitting progressive politics against the president’s reactionary policies.

  LOOKING BACK, I SEE HOW, at least to some extent, finally writing my thesis on Marx took me from the literary salon of the ’70s to the political battlefield of the ’80s. Of course, it was never that clearcut. I was
politically involved in the ’70s and I was still obsessed with literature in the ’80s. The two have never been mutually exclusive. But there was definitely a shift. Hooking up with Michele, precisely at the time that her controversial book was published, drew me into a series of fascinating dialogues that were deeply political, not to mention racial. I relished those discussions, just as I relished my work toward social change alongside Michael Harrington and Stanley Aronowitz.

  My thesis, no matter how imperfect, was my declaration of faith. Of course I came to faith, and remain in faith, as a prophetic Christian. In that regard, I must define myself as a non-Marxist socialist. Basic differences between Marxists and Christians can never be reconciled. I deal with fear and anxiety—with the sheer absurdity of the human condition—through the lens of the cross. Marxism has nothing to say about the existential meaning of suffering, death, or love. It is solely preoccupied with improving social conditions. But I know that my personal condition—then and now—needed the songs of James Brown and Marvin Gaye and the Reverend James Cleveland, the King of Gospel, singin’ ’bout “This Too Will Pass,” the same James Cleveland who said, “I Don’t Feel Noways Tired.” I can’t live along the slippery slope of life’s abyss without the Jesus that I saw in the heart of my mom, my dad, my brother, and my sisters.

  I didn’t become a theologian for a single reason: I don’t believe that religious dogmas and doctrines can be rendered logically consistent and theoretically coherent. The scandal of the cross shatters all theological efforts. I didn’t become a full-blown philosopher because I saw so many philosophical truths outside of the philosophical canon, such as in the poetry of T.S. Eliot and the plays of Anton Chekhov. I became and remain a philosophically trained bluesman who looked to the good news of Jesus Christ. That’s the news, as I wrote in a new introduction to The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought, that “lures and links human struggles to the coming of the kingdom—hence the warding off of disempowering responses to despair, dread, disappointment and death.”