by Cornel West
On our first date, I heard myself saying things that sounded crazy even to me. Yet I said them.
“Elleni, marry me and become the First Lady of Black America.”
“You’re truly out of your mind. You don’t know me.”
“I know I want to marry you.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I am,” I said. “I’ve never met anyone like you. And I never will.”
“I have many entanglements and many problems. You will not want to be burdened by me.”
“You can never be a burden. Only a blessing. There’s no problem that we can’t overcome.”
“I have a problem that won’t go away.”
That’s when Elleni told me about the older Ethiopian man. For some years she had been with him. Then, no longer able to tolerate his possessiveness and insane jealousy, she finally broke it off. That had happened only months before we met. His reaction was frightening. He told her that if he ever saw her with another man, he’d kill him and her.
“He meant it,” she said. “He’s not stable.”
“I understand,” I said, “but you can’t allow him to dictate what you can and cannot do. If you want to date, well, that’s your decision, not his.”
“I’m having this date with you, but it must be the last.”
It wasn’t. I persevered. I persuaded Elleni that we couldn’t be fenced in by fear. Our lives had to be lived the way we saw fit.
She wasn’t interested in my teaching and lectures, which was fine with me. I loved taking her to movies. Going out to dinner. Dancing. We became romantically involved. And then one night, driving home, I glanced out the window to see another car speeding at us. I caught a glimpse of the man’s wild eyes as he tried to crash into the side of my car. I was barely able to swerve out of the way. Then it was on. He ran two red lights trying to run into us. Elleni was crying, “He has a gun!” I managed to lose him, but decided I wasn’t going to be unarmed again, not with him on the loose. I got a serious BB gun for symbolic protection and I intensified my prayer life. This guy was not to be taken lightly.
Things got funkier. Elleni went from waiting tables at the Holiday Inn to working at a hot dog stand in West Haven. The guy wouldn’t go away. He’d come by her gig and threaten her. He said that if she didn’t break it off with me he’d kill us both.
“Don’t worry about it, baby,” I said. “That’s just talk.”
“I wish it were, Cornel,” she replied. “But I know this man. He’s truly crazy. I can’t see you anymore.”
“I can’t see myself not seeing you. This guy is not scaring me off.”
But he did scare Elleni off. She was so frightened for her life that she decided to leave New Haven.
“I can’t take the pressure any more,” she said. “I can’t live this way. Please help me escape before it’s too late.”
At this point, there was no arguing with Elleni. The crazy man was in pursuit, and she saw no way out. One of her girlfriends and I went to her place in the middle of the night, snuck her out, drove to the station and put her on a train to New York.
“Thank you, Cornel,” she said. “I really appreciate everything you’ve done for us. But this is it for us.”
But it wasn’t.
IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT when she called from New York.
“He knows I’m here,” she said.
“How could have he found you?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but he called me on this number and said he was coming here to find me.”
“It’s a big city,” I said. “It would be like finding a needle in a haystack.”
“He’ll find me,” she said. “I know he will. I can’t stay here. I have to go somewhere even further way.”
“Wherever you go, Elleni, I’ll come see you. I need to be with you.”
“You need to forget me. Please forget me.”
PROPHETIC FRAGMENTS
IN 1988, MANY OF MY LECTURES, essays, and articles were collected in a volume I called Prophetic Fragments: Illuminations of the Crisis in American Religion & Culture. It was dedicated to my parents and carried a foreword by my brother Cliff. The quote at the front of the book came from scripture, John 6:12:
He said unto his disciples,
Gather up the fragments that remain,
That nothing be lost.
I had been writing in journals and speaking in public for years now. To some degree, I felt as though I’d been offering fragments of my thoughts and, rather than lose them, I needed to reread them, in some instances rewrite them and, put together, see if they did depict the cultural and spiritual crisis I was seeing all around me. As I wrote, the aim was “to examine and explore, delineate and demystify, counter and contest the widespread accommodation of American religion to the political and cultural status quo. This accommodation is suffocating much of the best in American religion; it promotes and encourages an existential emptiness and political irrelevance. This accommodation is, at bottom, idolatrous—it worships the gods created by American society and kneels before the altars created by American culture.” I go on to say that, “[l]ike so much of American culture, exorbitant personalistic and individualistic preoccupations in American religion yield momentary stimulation rather than spiritual sustenance, sentimental self-flagellation rather than sacrificial self-denial.”
At this moment in time, during the Ronald Reagan ’80s, I was trying to figure out who I was and what I had to say. “To be a contemporary religious intellectual—and person,” I wrote, “is to be caught in this creative tension on the boundary between past and present, tradition and modern—yet always mounted in the barricades on this battlefield on which life is lived and history is made.”
Thus I offered the book as fragments. A jazzman would call them riffs, pieces of prophetic insight and even prophetic poetry that could explain what was troubling my soul. I wrote, “These fragments—which feebly reflect the Christian faith that shores me up against the ruins in our world—are linked together by my response to one basic question: How does a present-day Christian think about and act on enhancing the plight of the poor, the predicament of the powerless, and the quality of life for all in a prophetic manner?”
I wrote about my friend Michael Harrington, whom I called “the socialist evangelist of our time and the bearer of the mantles of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas.” I wrote about what I called “Winter in Afro-America” in which “the impact of mass culture, especially through radio and television, has diminished the influence of the family and church. Among large numbers of black youth, it is black music that serves as the central influence regarding values and sensibilities. Since little of this music is spiritually inspiring, black people have fewer and fewer spiritual resources to serve them in periods of crisis. With the invasion of drugs in the black community, a new subculture among black youth has emerged, which thrives on criminal behavior and survives on hopelessness. The black rap music of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s ‘The Message’ and ‘New York’ makes this point quite clear. For the first time in Afro-American history, large numbers of black young people believe that nobody—neither God, mom, nor neighbor—cares. This spiritual crisis cannot go unheeded, for there can be no economic empowerment or political struggle without spiritual resources.”
I wrote about contemporary Afro-American social thought and the brilliant bell hooks. “Mindful of the degree to which both white feminists and black male activists are captives of liberalism, hooks promotes cultural transformation in present-day patriarchy in American society and in the black community, and links them to structural changes in the U.S. economy. Like Alice Walker and Audre Lorde in literature, hooks is one of the few black thinkers grappling with the complex relation to race, class, and gender oppression.”
I wrote about deep and original thinkers like Orlando Patterson, and serious scholars and leftist activists like Manning Marable. I wrote about “subversive joy and revolutionary patience in black Christianity,”
how “the gospel in Afro-America lauds Calvinistic calls to transform the world yet shuns puritanical repression … and how life is viewed as both a carnival to enjoy and a battlefield on which to fight.” I restated my faith that “Afro-American Christianity promotes a gospel which empowers black people to survive and struggle in a God-forsaken world.”
I wrote about the troubled state of Black-Jewish relations, a theme that would engage me for years to come.
I wrote about the tragic death of Marvin Gaye, shot by his father in 1984. He was, I explained, “first and foremost, a Christian artist, imbued with a deep spiritual sensitivity anchored in a Christ-centered ethic of love.”
I wrote at length about the various genres of Afro-American popular music, drawing analogies from Charlie Parker’s bebop to George Clinton’s technofunk. I discuss rap, the art form that had captivated me from its beginnings. I had first published a piece on rap as the American correspondent for Le Monde Diplomatique in 1982. I argued that “black rap music indeed Africanizes Afro-American popular music—accenting syncopated polyrhythms, kinetic orality, and sensual energy in a refined form of raw expressiveness—while its virtuosity lies not in technical facility but rather street-talk quickness and linguistic versatility. In short, black rap music recuperates and revises elements of black rhetorical style—some from our preaching—and black rhythmic drumming. It combines the two major organic artistic traditions in black America—black rhetoric and black music.”
I wrote about many of the major world figures of modern theology in an attempt to understand and explain what the best minds, past and present, have to teach us. I bemoaned the fact that “theologians and preachers are reluctant to engage in what Gramsci calls a ‘self-inventory’—a critical self-examination of their own middle-class status, academic setting, or social privilege. Yet a more self-critical viewpoint is imperative if the Body of Christ is to function in a more Christian manner.”
In the late ’80s, then, as a man in my mid-thirties, what was my own self-inventory? What did my critical self-examination look like?
I was surely a product of the black lower-middle class with working-class origins. I was surely supported by the academy. And I surely enjoyed social privileges not afforded the average guy. I also struggled with the position that my class, job, and social status gave me. As a middle-class black brother, I was well aware of the materialistic drive that characterized that group. I wouldn’t call myself materialistic, but, after two failed marriages, I had a financial weight hanging over my head. In that sense, I was bonded with millions of other middle-class men who found themselves in similar shape. The academy was my source of income, but the academy often clashed with my own sense of integrity. At Yale, for instance, I vehemently fought their opposition to the clerical union. I also fought against Yale’s support of South African business interests. I made my views clear and, as a result, was viewed by the administration as an outsider. Social privilege was of little interest to me; I didn’t care about hanging out at fancy parties with fancy people. I cared about articulating, with as much effectiveness as possible, my conviction that this crazy world of ours requires close scrutiny and vigorous Socratic questioning. I was looking to challenge and be challenged, looking to teach and be taught, looking to be a good student, an honest thinker, and a decent human being. I was trying to balance the personal with the professional.
After my fight with Yale, I returned to Union Theological Seminary— back with Brother Wash and the others. But after a few months, I received a call from the Sarah Vaughan of contemporary world literature—Toni Morrison. This is the greatest compliment I could pay anyone. To me, Sarah Vaughan is the height of artistic genius in twentieth-century culture. Any time Sarah appeared in New York, I was there in the front row. Between sets I was there in her dressing room, lighting her cigarettes with gentle reverence.
“Are you sure you’re not hurting your throat, Miss Vaughan?”
“I’m fine, honey. Thank you.”
Now I had to thank Toni Morrison for suggesting my next move.
“Would you seriously consider coming with me to form an intellectual neighborhood in Princeton?” Toni asked.
I was really planning on staying at Union, but when Sarah Vaughan, the Divine One, sings, you listen. I thought of Toni as a kind of divine vehicle beckoning me to pursue my calling at Princeton. Princeton had been my Ph.D. stomping grounds. Princeton had embraced me early on. Princeton had a super-bad faculty and Princeton was just down the Jersey Turnpike from New York City, where I could hear all the jazz, lectures, Broadway plays, and Stephen Sondheim musicals.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
PRINCETON WAS AN ACTION-PACKED SCHOOL. After eleven years of teaching, this was also my first full-time position in the secular academy. The idea that I would be heading up a program, especially one devoted to a subject matter so close to my heart, gave me hope that I could make some significant difference. I was to be the director of African American Studies. My dear brother President Harold Shapiro, Professor Daniel Rodgers, and especially my dear sister Vice Provost Ruth Simmons made it possible.
I’ll never forget the warm welcome given me by my good friend Michael Walzer at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He regularly asked me to lunch and to spirited seminars with outstanding figures like Clifford Geertz and Albert Hirschman. Walzer also invited me to serve on the board and write for Dissent, the famous democratic socialist journal founded by the renowned New York intellectual Irving Howe. Walzer was the nemesis of Edward Said. Yet both remained my good friends.
In a personal sense, my intense professional activity at Princeton also became a distraction from the distress I felt from Elleni’s situation. She was in Tampa, and the idea of us being together, a long-held dream of mine, seemed to be on permanent hold.
There was much to do at Princeton. Naturally I had to attend to the curriculum, the faculty, and a wealth of administrative issues. I was much aided by the marvelous manager of the African American program, Dr. Gayle Pemberton. The lovely Hattie Black and the supportive Comfort Sparks made my job a joy. I was determined that my first act would be to honor two of the men who led the way in Afro-American studies: Harold Cruse and St. Clair Drake.
Cruse was a courageous thinker, writer, and teacher who, along with Amiri Baraka—then known as LeRoi Jones—had founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem. His masterwork, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, published in the ’60s, had a profound influence on generations to follow, though my favorite of his is Rebellion or Revolution. He began teaching at the University of Michigan and was a principal architect of their Afro-American and African Studies Department. The man was far ahead of the curve. In fact, he helped design the curve. Most astoundingly, he held a high position at the University of Michigan until he retired in the’80s—yet he had never graduated from college. He didn’t have to. His intellectual creativity excelled the vast majority of those holding degrees. No doubt about it, I wanted to honor Harold Cruse.
When I first met St. Clair Drake through my high school partner Glenn Jordan after my first year at Harvard, the man impressed me mightily. Early on, he had set up Stanford’s African American Studies. In doing so, he faced powerful forces that argued against his approach, but by virtue of his commitment, scholarship, and pure tenacity, he prevailed. I respected Professor Drake and wanted to bring him to Princeton, where we could applaud him for his grand achievements.
Finally, with the considerable prestige of Princeton behind me, I had the wherewithal to publicly recognize black thinkers who had triumphed in academia on their own terms against heavy odds.
You can imagine, then, how excited I was when St. Clair Drake was on his way from California to accept this honor from Princeton. I drove up to Newark Airport to pick him up in my shiny new, pitch-black 1988 Cadillac Sedan DeVille. (By the way, I’m glad to report that twenty years later I’m still driving that car. I still consider it the coldest ride on the road. Dad had bought his f
irst Cadillac in 1962. Seeing how happy it made him, I always wanted a Cadillac of my own.)
I was at the gate when Dr. Drake’s plane landed. Next thing I know, they’re carrying out a man on a stretcher. It was St. Clair Drake. He had a stroke during the flight, and suddenly I found myself following an ambulance to the hospital. The stroke was severe, and for four days and nights I stayed by his side. I slept at the foot of his bed, hoping that my presence might offer him some comfort. Through an act of friendship that I’ll explain in a minute, I had the majestic Kathleen Battle come and sing to him at his bedside.
His recovery was only partial—he died some two years later— and we had no choice but to give him his award in the hospital room.
This turn of events deeply touched my heart. I was reaching back to a man who had reached out to me when I was a college kid looking for direction. He was what I wanted to be—a broadly engaged thinker whose sense of the academy rejected traditional restrictions and offered a vision that was generous and expansive. His stroke brought home the fact that it was up to my generation to insure that his legacy lives on.
I have tried. I have not always succeeded, but I have never lost sight of the trail blazed by brave pioneers like St. Clair Drake and Harold Cruse.
IT WAS ALSO MY PRIVILEGE to bring Professor Edward Said to Princeton, where he had studied as an undergraduate. Back when I was teaching at Union, Edward had told me that he had been diagnosed with leukemia. Even though he was an impassioned secularist and nonbeliever, he didn’t object when three hard-core black Christians—James Washington, James Forbes, and myself— prayed for him in his apartment. His teary eyes revealed how deeply our love had touched him. He would live an amazingly productive life for the next sixteen years.
When Said, a prominent Palestinian intellectual and critic of Israeli policy, came to lecture at Princeton in the late ’80s, it was a period when I had befriended Omar Pound, the only child of the legendary poet Ezra Pound. Omar, a fine teacher of writing and free of his father’s vicious anti-Semitism, also helped me sponsor Arno J. Mayer, an iconoclastic historian whose recent book on the Holocaust had stirred controversy. Both lectures proceeded in the face of threats against all of us. At one point while Edward was speaking, someone cut off the lights and we wondered whether this was our moment of truth. Fortunately, the lights went back on and Professor Said was able to speak his truth at our beloved alma mater.
