Читать книгу The Forbidden Word - James Henry Harris - Страница 5

For the first time in my life, at age fifty-three, I’m reading Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Imagine me sitting alone in the classroom on the first day, a good ten minutes early. This in itself is really out of character for me because I am usually a few minutes late for everything except Sunday morning worship or a funeral. And, even these holy rituals have not completely escaped my tardiness. I am not the best example. But, on this day I wanted to counterbalance this myth—to dispel the notion that Black people are so consistently late that they have a time-consciousness of their own.

I smiled, choosing a table and a chair where I can see the door. I have a phobia about having my back to the door. I always sit where I can see how to escape. On this particular day, I also wanted to see the young graduate students who would be studying with me as they walked in. I didn’t have to wait very long. The first one came strutting through the door about two minutes after I did. He was a short white male who looked to be about twenty-five years old, with shaggy hair and rimmed glasses that made him appear a bit older. I noticed a strange looking tattoo on both of his arms. His arms were long and his hands were big—like those of the boxer Oscar de la Hoya. I guess I noticed this because his hands and arms were disproportionate to his rather diminutive body. I didn’t want him to see me gazing, so I waited until he reached over in his backpack before I ventured another glance. The right arm had a tattoo of what appeared to be a flag on it. I leaned forward slowly to get a better look. Then, like a thief, I turned and looked out the window. I thought to myself, Is that the American flag or a Confederate flag? In Richmond, the confederacy is kept alive by statues on Monument Avenue. It is lined with statues of soldiers who fought for the South during the Civil War. I was just about to ask the meaning of his body art when a group of young students came through the door and rescued me.

There were about seven or eight of them, but they made so much noise I thought it was more than the room could hold. After a minute or so, a young white girl barely in her twenties walked in. She had spiked hair and carried a purple pocketbook. She looked like a member of a rock band. Next came an older woman with a leather briefcase. She looked like a teacher in her late forties. I later learned that she was a lawyer who drove fifty miles down to Richmond from Williamsburg just to take this one class on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

By the time the clock struck four, there were ten people sitting around four tables pushed together for the once a week seminar held every Thursday from 4:00 to 6:40 p.m. The professor must have come in shielded by the noise and a number of students who had descended upon the classroom just a minute or so before the seminar was scheduled to begin. He was directly under what looked to me like a portrait of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general. Or maybe it could have been Lee’s partner, Stonewall Jackson. They all look alike to me. It’s the horses they ride and the uniforms they wear. The room was, in fact, an old dining room converted into a classroom in a building that was an antebellum plantation mansion. In my mind’s eye the room became a mirror of old sins and transgressions. It began to speak of the past. I could see the slave master and his wife ordering breakfast and telling the Black servants that the floors needed to be swept and cleaned, and the pots and pans scrubbed, and the silver platters polished at least an hour before sunset. The images overwhelmed me. My mind became a matrix of past and present, and even the future was bearing down on me, causing me to tremble in my seat.

I thought about how this was the sort of place where privilege and patriarchy were born and raised, nurtured by the tradition of Black folk cooking and serving delectables on shining silver platters to their slave master’s delight. This is where Black folk learned the ways of white folk. This is where Black folk acquired the necessary astuteness to speak, breathe, and exist without the Otherness that defined them. They learned how to pretend that everything in life was fine and dandy when life itself was a pride-swallowing siege. It is where the practices of smiling, “soft-shoeing,” and “cooning” were refined into a tradition of degradation and self-deprecation. This is the house in which Blacks learned to wear masks and store their anger in their hearts and souls.

My sitting in this classroom seemed a tad incredible, considering that a little more than 150 years earlier, I would have been forced to help build the walls that now surrounded me. As I looked at these walls, they returned my stare, and my imagination was seized by the history that had brought these walls to be. These walls spoke of that history. Even the layers upon layers of paint and lacquer could not conceal their speech. They spoke a language that only I could hear. I could feel it. I could understand it, though I couldn’t speak it. They spoke of my ancestors with callused hands and bent backs, building these walls day and night. In the heat and in the cold, in the rain and in the sunshine. I could also see them big and Black, bent over with callused hands, scrubbing the windows that made the sun-drenched carpet look like a fading rainbow. I could hear the horrors trapped within these plastered walls—the muted screams of Black women and girls being raped by their slave masters, the moans and groans of field hands being whipped by overseers. I could hear the cries of families torn apart in the name of profit—sold on the auction block for a few pieces of silver. The acrid smell of human bodies, burnt and branded by the slave master’s whip and the sun’s heat, filled my senses. I had a total eclipse of the brain as sorrow and anger seeped through my spirit.

Everybody was still buzzing about themselves, but I was lost in deep thought about the “Middle Passage,” or the forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the shores of America. I thought of words like commodity, nihilism, slavocracy, and the banality of evil. Though I sat frozen in a trance, my imagination was set ablaze and fueled by the agonizing winds of history. Had I been listening, I would have known what the other class members had said as they introduced themselves. But I was beside myself, I was overwhelmed by the agony of my slave ancestors. I tried to remember my African dialect—my native language. I know this sounds unreal to a person whose language is his own, but my language is not mine. I strain in my dreams and my imagination to remember, but I can’t.

What should I say about myself? The class was waiting. They were all staring at me. I was thinking. I was teetering on the brink of—delirium. Anticipation lurked in the furrows and freckles of a sea of white faces. Suddenly, I realized that I was the only African American in the class.

Ten or twelve students stared at me, puzzled and confused, but I couldn’t respond. Ernest Gaines’ opening line from A Lesson Before Dying came back to me: “I WAS NOT THERE, yet I was there.” That was my condition. I was in a twilight zone that was my own purgatory. I felt trapped between past and present. I thought I heard some mumbling or a snicker or two, but I couldn’t snap out of it. I started thinking . . . why weren’t more Blacks in this class. At least one other Black person—just one so I wouldn’t feel so isolated, so alone. Could this really be so, that only one Black male and no Black females had registered for this class on Mark Twain? Did they know something that I didn’t know? Was Mark Twain considered a racist? Or was Huck Black as Shelley Fisher Fishkin had asked? Was he really that different from all other white Americans? There was so much that I didn’t know about Mark Twain and so much that I didn’t know about myself. My feelings took hold of me and I was surprised not by the joy of C. S. Lewis, but by pain and anger. Even a sorrowful sadness blanketed my face.

Why? In a university with thirty thousand students, how could this absence of Black students be explained? Maybe studying English literature in an age of technology was just too impractical for most young Black people. Maybe there was too much reading and writing and analysis and not enough sound bites. This class was not postmodern enough. It was not in the business school or the school of education. Maybe reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was just too painful. Maybe they really did know that the class conjured too many emotions and caused too much stress. Or maybe other Blacks just couldn’t see how this class would help them get a job to pay the rent and buy the groceries. It was too esoteric and not pragmatic enough. I already had a job.

I admit it is hard to survive in the jungles of our cities and communities. It is hard to read and study the life and words of old white men like Mark Twain and his progenitors—Plato, Aristotle, and the Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Euripides, and others—when energy prices are sky high and the cost of a loaf of bread and a pound of anything edible is almost prohibitive. It could be a pound of cheese or a pound of bologna. This is a common folks’ food—like sardines and saltine crackers. Poor folk’s delectables. These are the realities that most Black people face. This is the world where some people were treated differently because of their dark skin and their dual African and American connection—like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, or Frederick Douglass.

It seems that the axis through American slavery makes the difference in life. We had a WASP neighbor a few years ago whose children were patients of a Black pediatrician who was a medium-brown-complexioned person with straight hair. The skin color was more Black than anything else. I knew the doctor to be African American, but my neighbor, in discussing her children’s physician, indicated that their doctor was Indian or Lebanese. I was not about to burst her bubble and tell her that her children’s doctor was in fact Black. It was okay for him to be anything except African American. The texture of his hair helped them to ignore the tone and color of his skin. Maybe that’s why some Black folk are hair freaks—obsessed with perms, wigs, extensions, weaves, relaxers. The goal is to transform kinky hair into straight hair, which is said to be “good hair.” When a Black woman has long, flowing, straight hair, other Blacks will quickly say, “Child, that’s not her hair. She bought that hair from the Koreans. Can’t you tell where her real, God–given hair ends?” Your skin can be as Black as soot, but if your hair is straight like the Asians and not kinky, then white folks will call you Indian or Asian or Hawaiian, but not Black or African American.

I thought my reasoning about hair was simply cultural until I read Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel American Pastoral, in which he describes the main character’s wife Dawn Levov, Miss New Jersey’s efforts to become Miss America. The narrator goes on and on about the details and intricacies of the pageant and then he interjects, “The Southern girls in particular, Dawn told him, could really lay it on: ‘Oh, you’re just so wonderful, your hair’s so wonderful . . . ” Then the narrator utters these words: “The veneration of hair took some getting used to for a girl as down-to-earth as Dawn; you might almost think, from listening to the conversation among the other girls, that life’s possibilities resided in hair—not in the hands of your destiny but in the hands of your hair.”

The veneration of hair is not simply a fetish for Black people. And, it was not the veneration of hair in the first place. It was the value and importance of hair texture. Straight versus kinky. White versus Black. That’s where the issue becomes more social and psychological than aesthetic. Still, I was glad to see that I wasn’t the only one who had such beliefs about hair. Henry Louis Gates in Colored People also gives us a short dissertation about Black people and their obsession with “nappy hair on colored heads.”

For Blacks, this veneration of straight hair exemplifies the desire to be like whites and to loathe that which is Black. The long hard fight for equality and justice in public education was hair- and skin color-related.

In 1950, Black psychologists Kenneth Clark and his wife Mamie Phipps Clark published the findings of their legendary doll study demonstrating and documenting how racial segregation impacted the self-esteem of Black children. When the Clarks asked little Black children between three and seven years old to choose between identical Black and white dolls, the majority of Black children preferred the white doll, and attributed positive characteristics to it. When asked to color a picture of themselves, the same children used white or yellow crayons. Society, in the form of segregation and racism, had taught the children to hate the color of their skin and the texture of their hair. The U. S. Supreme Court specifically cited this study in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. The Clarks taught society about the effects of racial oppression on the behavior and actions of Black children in the form of their Supreme Court testimony. But this was a lesson Black folks have been learning and relearning every day of their lives before and after the Clark study.

Later, reading the course description online, I reasoned that to most young people, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn probably seemed a waste of time. It would be much more practical to study the American pragmatists William James, Charles Peirce, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois, or Booker T. Washington than to be confronted with reading and hearing the word nigger again and again. I had certainly heard about the book and its contents, but never thought to read it until now.

I was on sabbatical for a year, but my sabbatical was really not a time to rest because I had to wrestle with the language and meanings of Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad and Charles Chestnutt. A language laden with the forbidden word nigger. A Sabbath is a time of daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly rest as a result of recognizing the work that God has allowed us to do. It is a spiritual experience that suggests the beneficiary of such a deserved and well-earned gift will take time to bask in the opportunity to meditate and reflect, to write, to read, and to plan for the future—absorbing the sights and sounds of adventure and wonder. To the intellectual, this is ultimate pleasure, freedom, and serenity. The ancient rabbis taught that this menuha makes God’s creation complete. Without rest, creation is unfinished. Jewish scholar and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel says that the Sabbath is an atmosphere, not a date. “The Sabbath teaches all beings whom to praise.” Yet my own sabbatical was hard to fully embrace. It was somewhat out of character for me; except, I reasoned, that my study of literature was indeed in praise of God. I wanted to spend time studying and learning a new discipline—conquering another subject in praise of God’s gift of love and grace to me.

English literature, rhetoric, and writing had been a part of my theology and humanities training, but now I was determined to focus on literature and writing fiction and non-fiction. I am possessed by a desire to read more works by some of the Black literati: Nella Larsen, Ernest Gaines, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Charles Chestnutt, Toni Morrison, Marita Golden, Zora Neal Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Charles Johnson. And not just Black writers, but others such as James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Adrienne Rich, Albert Camus, Vladimir Nabokov, and the so called king of American literature, Mark Twain. I was excited, but I was also sorely afraid because these days education is highly technological and I am so Neanderthal. Everything is done online: application, registration, drop/add, reading assignments, grades, etc. I have been in school off and on for thirty years, long before everyone started coming to class with a laptop and a jump drive. Believe it or not, I still write with a pen or a pencil and use a notebook, the old-fashioned kind made of paper with lines to write on. I was afraid that I would be out of place in a postmodern craze of self absorption and subjectivity. The environment of laptop computers and online research was daunting. And, that was not the major fear. The weakness of my understanding of literature scared me so much that I almost decided to forgo learning anything new. I have no natural talent for this type of learning given that I can barely ever get a story straight. The story of my own life is an infinite search for a self that is in perpetual motion.

Still, I picked up the telephone, called the university, and set up a meeting with the chairperson of the English department to discuss the fact that I had done twelve seminars of graduate work in philosophical theology, ethics, and culture at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. I was doing that to augment my teaching ability—not seeking another degree. I was readily received by the department chair and assistant dean, an expert in American literature. She was a charming and compassionate woman who encouraged me to register for six courses. “Some credit hours can be transferred from the many graduate courses you have taken,” she said. “That sounds great for a guy like me,” I responded. I had accumulated straight A’s and A–minuses while studying at some of the Commonwealth of Virginia’s best universities.

Once in a particularly engaging seminar where the discussion centered around American democracy, I interjected that Jeffersonian democracy was grounded in duplicity, inequality, and racism. I went on to say that not only did Jefferson own slaves while writing about liberty and justice for all, but he was also a slave trader and sexually active with Sally Hemings, a fourteen year old slave and half-sister of his deceased wife. Some historians have written that he is the father of her six children who looked a lot like him to the amazement of neighbors and visitors to Monticello. “Is this modern day sexual abuse,” I asked. I said that he was a promoter of the commodification of the Black body, explaining that the duplicitous behavior of Jefferson was in fact as American as Twain’s use of nigger. “Dad blame it.” Talk about democracy! All the whites in the room knew this and more. And yet there was a deafening silence, like a dark pall of smoke and ash had engulfed the entire classroom. Again, I was the only Black in the room and all eyes were jabbing my soul as if I had committed a heinous crime. Smiles turned to frowns. Puffy white faces became red as Hanover tomatoes; smooth brows became deeply furrowed and the young white doctoral students refused to recognize that there was more than one voice in the room. I had spoken up that day after sitting in silence for a long time. I was hoping that I would not be compelled to speak. But nobody, not even the professor, seemed willing to acknowledge that there is an “otherness” that must be heard if learning is to take place. Long before that class, I realized how political and propagandizing American education really is. I also felt that younger Blacks had to be struggling with their identity as African Americans in environments that often brushed aside the Black experience. Liberal Arts ain’t too liberal after all, I thought to myself. Univocity is the order of the day.

When my son graduated with a JD/MBA from Boston College Law School and the Carrol School of Business, thirty-five family members and friends made the trip to Newton, Massachusetts to witness this grand event. I noticed that of the nearly 300 graduates, only three were African American. This was one percent of the graduating class. Looking at the family and friends walking into the grand refectory together, my son said, “Dad, I have never seen this many Black people here during my four years on this campus.”

“I know you’re right. This is a pretty elitist school, you know. Senator and presidential candidate John Kerry and the Black congressman from Virginia, Bobby Scott, graduated from here.”

“Yeah, I know, Dad.”

“Look at the high ceilings and the walls paneled in California redwood or is that red oak? The Jesuits ain’t doing too bad,” I said.

I could tell he was happy because everybody could witness the pride of the Black family in his accomplishments. We all graduated from Boston College Law School that same day.

Before the commencement ceremony, we had lunch together in the law school cafeteria. It was for the graduates and their families. I told the hostess that we had a bus load of people from Virginia coming in at any minute. “Can you help me hold these six tables for my family?” I pleaded.

“I’ll try to keep them for you,” she said, while gesturing to her colleague to help her hold the tables. I went to help direct our family and friends to the right place. When I returned, all the tables were gone except one. I asked the hostess what happened and she threw up her hands and said, “Sorry. I couldn’t stop them. There are no reservations, you know.” Unable to sit together, we integrated ourselves into the sea of Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants who were there.

Throughout the day I observed and took mental notes on the state of graduate education and the conditions that Black people still have to negotiate to survive and get ahead. Well, so much for diversity and affirmative action, I thought. Culture means acculturation to most white folk even in the prestigious liberal universities: theology and culture, religion and culture, philosophy and culture. In my theology and culture seminar at the University of Virginia the focus was on St. Augustine, Schleiermacher, and Kathryn Tanner. This is the extent of the worldview regarding the study of God and humankind—theology and culture’s only axis was through Western Europe and the United States’ kinship to Europe. Africa and the African diaspora played no part in the formal discussion of culture.