6.
The Boy in the Library
Peter Abrahams was born in Vrededorp, a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1919. His family was poor, and his education consequently spotty. (In the tripartite system of apartheid South Africa, Abrahams was neither white nor black, but colored. However, he had skin dark enough to make people think that he was black, which cost him no end of trouble.) By the time he was ten years old, he had acquired, with considerable difficulty, three books. One was a famous anthology of British poetry called Palgrave’s Golden Treasury; a second was Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare; the third was an Everyman edition of the poems of John Keats. These books meant the world to Abrahams. They showed him beauty and possibility and hope.
But again, his family was poor, and they needed him to work. School was a luxury they could not afford. So he found himself on the streets of Johannesburg carrying groceries and doing other menial tasks for white women for just pennies a day. His love of poetry faded, as did his hope for a better life than the one he had: all his energy was taken up by the challenges of collecting those pennies.
And then one day he was standing on a street corner in Johannesburg next to a well-dressed black man who had a newspaper tucked under his arm. As Abrahams idly scanned the headlines he attracted the curiosity of the man, who knew that this little black boy could not possibly be literate. Yet upon questioning, he discovered that the boy could indeed read. Embarrassed by his own too easy assumption, he asked Abrahams to go to a nearby place called the Bantu Men’s Social Centre and ask for work there. The center had been founded just a few years earlier by an American minister named Ray E. Phillips and was already on its way to becoming a fixture in the social world of black and colored residents of Johannesburg. (Just a few years after Abrahams showed up, a young man named Nelson Mandela would become a member.)
The center took Abrahams in and gave him some work to do, and when time permitted he browsed the shelves of the center’s library. There he came across a curious book. It was by a man named W. E. B. Du Bois, and it was called The Souls of Black Folk, and when Abrahams opened it he saw a strange and powerful sentence: “For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, struggle, the Negro is not free.” As he reports in his 1954 autobiography, Tell Freedom, Abrahams was stunned by this clear and crisp formulation: “But why had I not thought of it myself? Now, having read the words, I knew that I had known this all along. But until now I had had no words to voice that knowledge. Du Bois’s words had the impact of a revelation.”
That first book lead to many others: “In the months that followed, I spent nearly all my spare time in the library of the Bantu Men’s Social Centre. I read every one of the books on the shelf marked: American Negro literature. I became a nationalist, a colour nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me.”
And yet—this is the really fascinating thing about Abrahams’s story—his discovery did not abolish or even displace his love for the three books from England that had nurtured him so richly before his discovery in the Bantu Men’s Social Centre Library. Instead, there arose in him a profound tension between the different kinds of aspirations presented to him by these two sets of books. “My mind was divided,” he wrote. “The call of America’s limitless opportunities was strong. The call of Harlem, Negro colleges, and of the ‘new Negro’ writers, was compelling. But Charles Lamb, John Keats, Shelley, and the glorious host they lead made a counter call.”
Another young person who would hear the call of John Keats, decades later, was the English writer Zadie Smith. When she was a teenager, around 1990, growing up as a mixed-race child in Willesden, in northwest London, and just beginning to think that she might want to write, Keats became vital for her, as a voice and an example. “I was fourteen when I heard John Keats . . . and in my mind I formed a bond with him, a bond based on class.” True, “Keats was not working-class, exactly,”—though I think his early life was indeed working-class—“nor black, but in rough outline his situation seemed closer to mine than the other writers you came across. He felt none of the entitlement of, say, Virginia Woolf, or Byron, or Pope, or Evelyn Waugh or even P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie.” That Keats was an outsider with no clear path into the literary world was key to his appeal for Smith. “Keats offers his readers the possibility of entering writing from a side door, the one marked ‘Apprentices Welcome Here.’”
Keats was a white man, Zadie Smith a mixed-race woman. But they had much in common too: they were not just English but also Londoners, even though Willesden had been a country town in Keats’s day. It meant a lot to Smith to notice and lean on those connections. “The term role model is so odious, but the truth is it’s a very strong writer indeed who gets by without a model kept somewhere in mind. I think of Keats.”
Peter Abrahams almost certainly knew nothing about Keats’s upbringing. And others of his favorites he had not even that in common with. The English language alone, and the beauty with which those writers used it, seems to have been the attraction. And as powerfully as the Harlem writers spoke to Abrahams’s condition, that beauty was irresistible.
Abrahams knew that he would leave South Africa if he could manage it. But he had to assess the “two forces that pulled me, first this way, then that.” It was clear that “America had more to offer me as a black man. If the American Negro was not free, he was, at least, free to give voice to his unfreedom.” And yet “England, holding out no offer, not even the comfort of being among my own kind, could counter that call.” But how was that? “Because men now dead had once crossed its heaths and walked its lanes, quietly, unhurriedly, and had sung with such beauty that their songs had pierced the heart of a black boy, a world away, and in another time.” The enchantment arose from distance and difference.
I decided. I would go to England one day. Perhaps I would go to America afterwards, but I would go to England first. I would go there because the dead men who called were, for me, more alive than the most vitally living.
In 1939 Abrahams made his way to London, and lived in England, writing fiction and journalism, until 1956, when he moved to Jamaica, his home for the rest of his life.
“My mind was divided.” We observed a similar condition in the previous chapter, where we saw readerly minds divided between skepticism and hope, between critical incision and the quest for a “utopian moment.” But this is a rather different kind of division. Whether holding his three books or a copy of The Souls of Black Folk, Abrahams seeks encouragement—encouragement to pursue something higher and better than a life of serving white Johannesburg women for pennies and going home at night to the slums. But as compelling as Du Bois’s voice was to him—after all, his reading of “American Negro literature” did make him a “colour nationalist”—the voices of the dead English poets were more compelling still: “the dead men who called were, for me, more alive than the most vitally living.” What they offered him was the temporal bandwidth that increased his personal density in ways he could not define but that he came to feel essential to his well-being. Perhaps at another stage of his life he would need to hear a different message, drink from a different well. But at that moment it was the English poets who commanded his allegiance. And so he made his way to England.
At the end of the eighteenth century, in Boston, Massachusetts, a man named Caleb Bingham published an anthology entitled The Columbian Orator: Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces Together with Rules, Which Are Calculated to Improve Youth and Others, in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence. The book became enormously popular, was used in schools all over the United States, went through many revisions and new editions, and then, decades after its first publication, fell into the hands of a barely literate slave boy in Virginia, a boy we know as Frederick Douglass. In his autobiography, he describes the experience:
I was now about twelve years old, and the thought of being a slave for life began to bear heavily upon my heart. Just about this time, I got hold of a book entitled “The Columbian Orator.” Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book. Among much of other interesting matter, I found in it a dialogue between a master and his slave. The slave was represented as having run away from his master three times. The dialogue represented the conversation which took place between them, when the slave was retaken the third time. In this dialogue, the whole argument in behalf of slavery was brought forward by the master, all of which was disposed of by the slave. The slave was made to say some very smart as well as impressive things in reply to his master—things which had the desired though unexpected effect; for the conversation resulted in the voluntary emancipation of the slave on the part of the master.
The “Dialogue between Master and Slave” was originally published in 1793 in a book called Evenings at Home, or, The Juvenile Budget Opened, by John Aikin and his sister Anna Barbauld (whom many scholars suspect to be the author of this dialogue, given her known commitment to abolitionism). The idea was for the dialogue to be read by a family as a means of pleasure and moral instruction; Bingham saw that it could easily be adapted to a schoolroom setting. It is not hard to imagine the young Douglass saying to himself—or perhaps, when he could be sure of not being overheard, declaiming aloud—the bold words of the slave:
I was treacherously kidnapped in my own country, when following an honest occupation. I was put in chains, sold to one of your countrymen, carried by force on board his ship, brought hither, and exposed to sale like a beast in the market, where you bought me. What step in all this progress of violence and injustice can give a right? Was it in the villain who stole me, in the slave-merchant who tempted him to do so, or in you who encouraged the slave-merchant to bring his cargo of human cattle to cultivate your lands?
But this dialogue was not the only text in The Columbian Orator that moved the slave boy. “In the same book, I met with one of Sheridan’s mighty speeches on and in behalf of Catholic emancipation”—that is, a speech made in the British Parliament by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a native of Dublin, arguing that the Roman Catholic faith should no longer be suppressed in Ireland. What is fascinating is how the young Douglass, while living in the most oppressive possible circumstances, understood the dialogue and the speech, the first dealing directly with his condition and the second occupied by a very different problem in a very different place, as speaking to him with equal power and almost in a single voice:
These were choice documents to me. I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance. The moral which I gained from the dialogue was the power of truth over the conscience of even a slaveholder. What I got from Sheridan was a bold denunciation of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights.
The young Douglass greatly treasured the “Dialogue” that directly expressed his own condition, in which someone who looked like him and experienced the bondage that he experienced spoke eloquent words in his own defense; but he also greatly treasured the words of an Irishman speaking in the British Parliament on an issue altogether other than chattel slavery. Both documents “gave tongue to interesting thoughts of [his] own soul,” which earlier had “died away for want of utterance.” In precisely the same way, Peter Abrahams found, a century later, that the words of Du Bois told him something vital that he both grasped and did not grasp: “I had known this all along. But until now I had had no words to voice that knowledge.” But his experience in reading the English poets had a similar revelatory power for him.
The experiences of these two men testify to the enormous power of reading. But the experiences of Abrahams and Douglass also show us that that power arises in some cases from likeness—from the sense that that could be me speaking—and from difference—that is someone very different from me speaking. For mental and moral health we need both. Our presentist moment overemphasizes the former and neglects the latter—or rather, rarely even acknowledges the latter. We tend to get at the need for otherness in different ways.
I wrote earlier of the Long Now Foundation, and one of its founders, the musician Brian Eno, has written about the value of thinking in terms of the “Big Here and the Long Now”—the Big Here being, you might say, spatial bandwidth. If that’s what we want, it ought to manifest itself in an interest in other cultures—say, learning other languages, or at least reading works from other cultures in translation. Sad to say, people in the English-speaking countries, especially in the U.S.A., tend not to be very interested in other languages or the literatures written in them. But we are interested in First Contact—the initial human encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence. We make many, many science fiction books and movies on that theme. Which suggests that, on some level, we are fascinated by a really Big Here, a Here big enough to encompass the galaxy. And that’s encouraging, isn’t it?
Perhaps not. I’m not encouraged by that kind of Big Here any more than I am encouraged by Donna Haraway’s project of “making generative oddkin” with pigeons, if it serves as a substitute for the more immediate and, well, real kinds of encounters. It seems that human beings have a proclivity for encountering otherness on their own terms—in controlled and nonthreatening ways. For instance, going to foreign countries in groups with fellow native English speakers and an English-fluent guide. And it’s not as though I don’t understand the impulse. I don’t do tour groups, but whenever I’m in another country and try to speak the local language I get a kind of pained smile from the person I’m talking to, who shifts immediately into English. Let’s just make this easier for both of us, shall we? I find the move to English impossible to resist: it’s so easy to acquiesce, and, after all, I can tell myself that I am being polite by following my host’s lead.
Perhaps even more comfortable is our cinematic experience: Even if terrible things happen in some of our SF First Contact movies, they happen in the movies, and then we get to go home, where nothing has changed. Moreover, as Simone Weil points out in a passage I quoted early in this book, the future we imagine is just that: not an alien anything, but what we imagine, what we can imagine. And often it’s what we can’t imagine that we’re most in need of.
All of these experiences point toward the value of pursuing, seriously, a genuine engagement with the past. It is other than us in a broad range of ways, and we can’t control that otherness. It speaks to us in ways that we can’t understand, and then (suddenly, unexpectedly) in ways we understand perfectly. When a slave boy in Virginia reads and thrills to a speech an Irishman made in London, or when a child from the slums of Johannesburg finds his heart touched and warmed by rhymes about rural England, that is the Big Here and the Long Now. And that’s available to all of us who have the requisite openness and patience, who are willing to risk being a bit bored, a bit confused, maybe even a bit angry. Access is easy; no systematic plan is required; the risks are low. But the rewards are potentially immense.*
The novelist and essayist Leslie Jamison has a tattoo on her arm. It’s a sentence in Latin: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto—I am human, and nothing human is alien to me. The line is from a play by the Roman poet Terence, and Jamison’s thoughts about it are interesting. First of all, when she describes it she leaves out a word: she says “I am human; nothing is alien to me,” leaving out the second use of “human.” I’m not sure about this: maybe what it’s like to be a bat, or a pigeon, or a hawk, or a beetle, really is alien to me. But more important, she speaks of the changes the phrase has undergone in her mind. When she got the tattoo, she “saw it then as an articulation of empathic possibility.” But that has changed a bit: “I see it now more as a sentiment that has a lot of internal tensions. How do we try to understand each other’s experiences? What are the limits of that understanding? I think it’s fine for sentiments to have tensions embedded inside of them. I think it’s useful. It keeps them crackly, in a good way.”
That’s a wonderful metaphor: the crackling that’s generated, the sparks that fly, when multiple responses to others, including others from the past, rub against each other. Terence’s line is one I quote often. When I do, I always point out that Terence does not say that everything human is transparent to him, instantly accessible to him. He says it is not alien, not wholly outside the scope of his experience, not opaque to his inquiries. It puts up resistance. But that resistance, and the work we do to overcome it, are alike necessary to the task of breaking bread with the dead.