by Cornel West
I say bluesman because the bluesman, who comes out of the black Christian culture, is telling the story differently. He has good news, but his news puts a different kind of hurtin’ on the gospel. His news says this: If I sing my blues, I’ll lose my blues—at least for those precious moments when I’m singing. His news says that the story of our lives—our losses, our depression, our angst—can be simplified and funkafied in a form that gives visceral pleasure and subversive joy, both to the bluesman and his audience.
We all got the blues. We all wanna lose our blues. We all gotta look for ways to do just that. What were my ways?
“THINK”
I WAS ON THE VERGE OF MARRYING Michele Wallace when my brother Cliff called and said, “You better think, Corn.” Cliff was quoting the Queen—Aretha had sung the daylights out of a song she’d co-written with Ted White called “Think.”
“You better think,” sang Aretha. “Let your mind go. Let yourself be free.”
The song was about freedom of all kinds.
“I think you better hold on to your freedom,” big bro argued. “You don’t wanna rush into anything crazy.”
“I’m crazy about Michele and she’s crazy about me.”
“I know she’s a wonderful woman,” Cliff said, “or you wouldn’t be so involved. All your women are wonderful, Corn. But I’m just wondering if y’all really know each other well enough to tie the knot. Why not just give it a little time?”
Strange thing about me and Cliff: close as we are, we don’t usually give each other advice about romantic relationships. We’ve both had a steep learning curve in this area. But we usually do what we do without consulting each other. So when my brother warned me about going too far too fast, I had to heed his words. I didn’t marry Michele.
Meeting Michele was a blessing, and living with her in New Haven was a joy. But Cliff was right. The relationship wouldn’t last. I’m challenged to tell you why. I’m challenged to understand the situation myself. It goes to the heart of many romantic involvements. I had grand hopes. I had dreams of long-lasting love. But I also had a calling that grew in intensity. The calling had me out there in the world, learning and teaching and dialoging with dozens of people whose minds nurtured my own. Women want and deserve inordinate attention. My attention was scattered, not by design but a force that I couldn’t control.
OUTSIDE UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, New York City kept calling to me. Not only did I love going to shows, off-Broadway and on, not only did I frequent the dance clubs who played the jams that kept me moving, like Chic’s “Good Times,” I was always running up to the Apollo to catch the Isley Brothers, or Rufus with Chaka, or this new singer with the honeycomb voice named Luther Vandross.
The Apollo is where I caught DJ Hollywood, one of the founding architects of a musical/cultural form that would soon evolve into hip-hop. I got hooked from the get-go. I loved the technical innovation—using turntables as percussive instruments—and I loved the approach to storytelling: the voice, not sung, but spoken in a metric bark. It got to the people. It got to me. I saw how its freshness blossomed from a happy synthesis of unhappy socioeconomic facts. Music education was drastically cut in neighborhood schools. Poor kids couldn’t get their hands on instruments. So self-invented artists—like Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and Kool Herc—invented instruments of their own. Flash is the innovator whose Furious Five put out “The Message” about inner-city rage and black resistance, a theme echoing Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. He and his gifted brothers pulled radios and speakers out of discarded cars piled up in the junkyards of the South Bronx. They put together massive sound systems. They identified key sections to songs—the funkiest riffs, the baddest breakdowns, the parts where pure rhythm penetrated deepest—and ran them together in a manner that was itself wholly original. They created musical collages as brilliantly innovative as anything to emerge from elitist forms of avant-garde art. The early rappers were also startlingly fresh. I still have a bias toward Old School Hip-hop artists like my brothers KRS-One, Rakim, and Eric B. Their skill at rhyming, soon to grow more complex and technically dazzling, was evident from jump street. They rejected a white normative gaze. They understood that their gift of language—the poetic language of the streets where they were raised—was a special gift. They didn’t have to unlearn and relearn another lexicon to express their artistic souls. They could be themselves. They could come at the world with their own equipment, their own stories, their own emotional and linguistic grammar. They were real.
My own reality was centered at Union and my ongoing dialogues with Jim Washington and Jim Forbes. These brothers helped me more than I can say. What a joy to be surrounded by friends who were not only intellectuals of astounding depth, but men who viewed theological and political systems with such critical acumen. On top of that, they were ministers who preached the gospel every Sunday! I loved them both more than words can express. I thank God that my own Christianity, challenged again and again by philosophies that rejected its tenets, was strengthened by my proximity to Wash and Jim who, in their very beings, exuded the love ethos of the Palestinian Jew we call Lord.
“HOW’S IT GOING, BRO?” Cliff was calling from California. It was October 1980.
“The Union gig is going great,” I said. “I’m picking up a parttime teaching thing at Yale. Just trying to stay strong.”
“You don’t have to try to stay strong, Corn. You are strong.”
“Had a date with a woman you need to meet. She’s magnificent, man. Just magnificent.”
“What’s her name, Corn?”
“Ramona Santiago.”
“Is that the Puerto Rican sister you told me that every man at Union has been trying to get next to? The one who heads up the personnel office?”
“The very same.”
“She’s quite a bit older than you, isn’t she?”
“She’s forty-one, Cliff.”
“And you’re twenty-seven.”
“And she has a son,” I said. “I hope to meet him soon.” “She’s a beautiful person,” I continued, “inside and out. Took her to see A Chorus Line on Broadway. We both had a ball”
“You see this as a serious situation?”
“She’s a serious woman, Cliff, with a seriously wonderful outlook on life. I’m feeling this very strongly.”
“Well, keep me posted, Corn.”
“I always do. I always will.”
Ramona lived in the Bronx. She was a believing Catholic. I was believing in her and she was believing in me. I started going to mass with her every Sunday. Wasn’t that I was fixing to leave my Baptist stronghold and embrace the papacy. But I’m the kind of Negro who can worship in a lot of settings and still feel the presence of God. I was happy to accompany her to church. I was happy to be in Ramona’s exquisite presence.
Ramona not only possessed extraordinary physical beauty but a sweetness that was out of this world. She spoke with a lilting Puerto Rican accent and had the kind of personality that put everyone at ease. She put me at ease. On the dance floor, she floated like a dream. We went to the clubs and danced the night away. We enjoyed a compatibility that was entirely free of stress. She spoke of fulfilling her ambition of becoming a first-grade teacher, and I supported her in that effort.
After our courtship continued for another six months, I called back Cliff.
“I think this is it,” I said. “Ramona is amazing. I see spending the rest of my life with her.”
“Sounds great, bro. As long as you’re happy.”
“Happier than I’ve ever been.”
“You’re going to propose?”
“I am.”
“And you think she’ll accept?”
“If I’m lucky.”
I was lucky. And everyone at Union knew I was lucky. Everyone who knew Ramona knew I was lucky. This woman was an absolute blessing in my life. Her level of heart, soul, mind, and style put her in a category all her own. We were married by Jim Forbes in the small Union chapel
on May 31, 1981. Brother Wash and Brother Cliff were my best men.
During our honeymoon—walking hand-in-hand across the historic plazas of Mexico City, marveling at the mighty revolutionary murals of Diego Rivera and the beautifully painful self-portraits of Frida Kahlo, exploring the charms of Acapulco, Taxco, and Guadalajara—I kept hearing the Ohio Players singing in my ear, “Heaven must be like this.” That week in Mexico with Ramona was among the most glorious of my life.
Back in New York, we settled down in the Bronx. Ramona was devoted to the Bronx. She was also devoted to her son Nelson. Nelson and I were close. When he started facing some extreme challenges, my family in Sacramento—especially Cliff and Dad— volunteered to help. Nelson moved out there and actually lived in my parents’ house until his life was straightened out.
Our life went on. My teaching reached a new level of intensity. At one point, I was conducting courses at Union, Yale, Haverford, and Williams. I was burning up the highways—New York to New Haven, the suburbs of Philly to the woods of western Massachusetts—racing from gig to gig. I welcomed the work, not only because I was finally learning to lecture in a free-form manner that both suited me and seemed authentic. I was seeing that my peculiar style, born in the black slices of Sacramento and the Shiloh Baptist Church, was working well with the students I was determined to reach. My classes were in demand. My life was in order. Or so I thought.
TRANE
AS A BOY, I LOVED THE MUSIC of my church and the music of my neighborhood. That meant gospel and rhythm-and-blues. Early on, I could feel how the genres related to one another. Underneath their infectious rhythms was the heartbeat of hope. The music was about getting up and getting on with the business before us. The songs moved us from fear to faith. Whether it was Andráe Crouch singing “The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power” or Curtis Mayfield singing “Keep on Pushing,” a sense of relentless hope informed the body of African American popular music that came into my life at a very early age and remained as a daily provider of sane tranquility.
As a student of African American history, I had read about jazz. I had an understanding of its various periods and knowledge of its virtuosic innovators. I knew about its development from New Orleans to Chicago, down to the territorial bands of Oklahoma and Texas, and up to Fifty-second Street, where bebop blossomed. I heard jazz and appreciated jazz, but jazz never possessed my soul as strongly as gospel or R&B.
Until John Coltrane came along and blew off the top of my head.
I was an infant in the ’50s when Coltrane was playing with Miles. I was kid in the ’60s when he was breaking through one artistic barrier after another. When Trane died in July 1967, I was still in junior high. That year, though, I was busy listening to Aretha singing “Respect” and Martha and the Vandellas singing “Jimmy Mack.” That was the year of Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her.”
Fifteen years later, though, I was approaching thirty. I had been married once and was now married again. I was convinced that, in Ramona, I had found the woman with whom I would live forever and a day. In my multitasking, multiteaching, peripatetic role as bluesman/teacher, I was gaining some traction. I’d thrown away my notes and found improvisation to be my most natural and effective style.
My lecturing style is often viewed as akin to preaching, yet I carefully distinguish between a passion to communicate that unsettles and unhouses, as opposed to a religious proclamation of good news. There is no doubt my rhetorical style is influenced by black preaching but the substance of what I have to say is thoroughly Socratic, prophetic, tragicomic, and democratic. I aspire to a level of intellectual and soulful presentation that sounds like the blues and jazz, if they could talk.
I WAS DIGGING DANCE MUSIC—in fact, digging it harder than ever in the pre-disco/disco/post-disco eras—when Earth, Wind & Fire said, “Sing a Song,” Dazz Band said, “Let It Whip,” and Evelyn “Champagne” King was talking about “Love Come Down.”
And then here comes John Coltrane. Here comes Coltrane on the dozens of records he cut on the Prestige and Blue Note labels. Here comes Coltrane playing with Miles Davis on the “Kind of Blue” album. Here comes Coltrane when he jumps over to the Atlantic label to do Coltrane Jazz and Giant Steps and My Favorite Things. Here comes Coltrane when he switches to Impulse and releases Live at the Village Vanguard and Africa Brass. Here comes Coltrane with his partners, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones. Here he comes doing a duet album with Duke Ellington, and then another with jazz vocalist Johnny Hartman, perhaps the most romantic album in the long and tortured history of human romance.
I had to catch up with these albums. And in the early’80s that’s just what I did. For reasons I’m not sure I can isolate, at this point in my life John Coltrane pierced my heart. I heard his cry. His voice took root somewhere deep inside me, and I found myself listening to every Coltrane record, reading every article and book pertaining to Coltrane, studying the man’s style and deriving from it a sense of strength that pushed me forward. He did not define his spirituality, as I did, in terms of Jesus Christ or Christian faith. But that didn’t matter because his artistic muse—what he called “A Love Supreme”—had us walking down parallel paths. He led me to that same place as the preaching of my childhood minister, the Reverend Willie P. Cooke. His vocabulary was different, but his sonic attitude—now joyful, now mournful, now playful, now serious—was similar. You can’t listen to Trane and not feel the tragic dimension of the stories he tells. “Alabama,” for instance, the composition he wrote to memorialize the four young precious black girls killed in the September 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, ranks alongside the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose poetic cadences had such a deep influence on this jazz musician. Like Shakespeare or Chekhov, Trane’s work gave a narrative rhythm to our human tragicomic condition. Just as the playwrights turned that condition into drama, he turned it into sound.
Coltrane riffed in a setting of onrushing rhythm that seemed to reflect my own rhythms. One of the unforgettable moments of my life was meeting his beloved wife Alice, who invited me to speak at her concert in Newark, where she called me “a warrior of love” in the tradition of her husband. “I listen to the beautiful music of Trane,” I said, “alongside my favorite string quartet— Beethoven’s Opus 131.”
Another inspiring moment came in Coltrane’s stomping grounds, Philadelphia, when Steve Rowland approached me after I had lectured. Steve is not only one of the most outstanding Trane experts alive, but the coproducer, along with Larry Abrams, of the best thing ever done on the jazz giant, a radio series called “Tell Me How Long Trane’s Been Gone.”
“Brother West,” Steve said “you remind me more of Trane than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I replied. “That’s the highest compliment I could ever be paid.”
Meanwhile, I was moving fast. I had to move fast. I had to hold down these three teaching jobs to feed the wolf that turned up at the door every month. Hilda was down there in Atlanta with Cliff, and they had their needs. Ramona had gone back to school to get her teaching degree. I needed to stay on it.
WILLIAMS COLLEGE WAS A WONDERFUL intellectual experience. God put me in the right place at the right time because it was at Williams where I met and befriended two of the giants of the humanities: the august E.H. Gombrich, author of the classic The Story of Art, and the distinguished historian Geoffrey Barraclough. I was also part of a high-powered seminar on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida led by Brother Mark Taylor. The highlight of my time at Williams was meeting my dear brother Professor David L. Smith and his lovely wife Vivian.
But even in this stratospheric atmosphere, I was a black man in America. Dig this:
One day, driving to Williams from New York, I was somewhere around Albany when the police stopped me. Figured I was speeding. I figured wrong.
“Get out the car, boy.”
Here we go.
Policeman looked over my driver’
s license, looked me in the face, and then nodded his head.
“Yup,” he said. “You’re the guy.”
“What guy?”
“Nigger we been looking for.”
“For doing what?”
“Selling cocaine.”
“I don’t sell cocaine.”
“What do you do?”
“Teach philosophy and religion at Williams.”
“And I’m The Flying Nun.”
“I’m a professor,” I reiterated.
“You’ve been snorting up your own merchandise. We got you down as a major dealer.”
“Impossible.”
“That’s what they all say.”
We went down to the station where the officer was convinced he’d made a major arrest.
“You can call your lawyer,” he said.
“Don’t need to. Just call my dean at Williams. Here’s his number. He’ll set you straight.”
The dean was outraged. He read them the riot act, and they immediately let me go, even if they did forget to apologize.
When arrested, threatened, or persecuted, I give myself permission to be full of righteous indignation and moral outrage but I try to never allow righteous indignation to degenerate into bitter revenge, or let moral outrage become hateful anger. My blues sensibility or tragic-comic disposition leads me to juxtapose the sheer absurdity of the situation with the utmost seriousness of the injustice. So I retain a painful smile on my face even as I respond to the undeniable hurt with intense ethical energy.
I LIKE MOVING IN FIVE different directions at the same time. It seems to suit my style, or maybe it just is my style. In any event, it’s how I’m still living my life. Back in these early teaching years, shuttling back and forth between a quartet of colleges, the notion of settling down with one gig never really entered my mind until I got a call from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. They offered me a professorship with tenure. To this wandering Negro, tenure was a big deal. Tenure meant no more multitasking overtime hustling. Tenure meant security for life.
