STUDS TERKEL WAS eighty years old Monday night. So what Studs did was publish another book. Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession. And what some of the rest of us did was go to a party for him, which he wasn’t permitted to tape-record. He had to sit there, being admired, which is one of the few things he isn’t good at. If you stay put, you might miss the action. While we were admiring Studs, for instance, they abolished democracy in Peru.
About the party, I won’t tell you everybody there, they already know who they are. Many of them have been fighting losing causes since the Spanish Civil War. But mention must be made of two celebrants I’ve never seen before in almost a quarter-century of New York literary cocktail parties. One was Pete Seeger, in the kitchen, without his guitar. The other was Kenneth Clark, who started testifying to the pathologies of American apartheid as far back as 1952, in Clarendon, South Carolina, when the NAACP began its legal suit to desegregate our public schools.
(Time flies away. Back in 1953, it was Ike, not Ronald Reagan, who had this to say about the American South to his new chief justice, Earl Warren: “These aren’t bad people. All they’re concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.”)
Clark, who must have had another party to go to, wore black tie. Seeger, of course, did not. Studs was his usual vision of red checkerboard. The rest of us lacked such dash.
Imagine Studs in action on the Chicago streets, on foot because he can’t drive, in a raincoat and battered hat, with a hearing aid and a tape recorder, bluffing his way into the Ida B. Wells housing project on the black South Side, sitting down in somebody’s kitchen, talking about race.
America’s premier oral historian is also one of the last of the integrationists—a throwback to Martin Luther King; and before Dr. King, to the left wing of the CIO; and before that, to Jewish socialism and the French Revolution. He’s kept the faith by continuing to test it. He will talk to anybody, and he listens twice, first right there in the kitchen, and then again when he edits the tapes for his books, where intelligence is made somehow musical, where conversations become cantatas. I’m tempted then to call him an oratorio historian. This is what Walt Whitman must have meant when he said he heard America singing.
Not all the songs in Race are cheerful. Everybody, white, black, brown, and yellow, seems to agree that relations between the races are worse than they’ve ever been, worse than they were in the sixties riots. Most blame the go-go greedhead Reagan years and the drug epidemic. Farrakhan gets mentioned more often than I’d have thought imaginable or desirable. As if in counterpoint to Farrakhan, there’s also a lot of country blues singer Big Bill Broonzy.
But nobody Studs talks to has given up. (Certainly not Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Mobley, who became a teacher after her son was murdered.) They have all got jobs to find, and children to raise, and neighborhoods to save, and a nation to recover from its waste of scruple, its conscience gone up in smoke like Puff the Magic Dragon.
Where does he find these people? Mostly, but not always, in Chicago. Some, but not most, he’s talked to before. Male or female, without exception, it’s their working lives that give them their perspective. They are paramedics, firefighters, and flight attendants; carpenters and computer software salesmen; steelworkers, musicians, hairdressers, medical students, hospital aides, and chauffeurs; union reps, evangelists, black separatists, and Ku Klux Klanners; ex-Communists, ex-priests, retired domestics, and many, many teachers, most of them despairing.
Each new Terkel book I make a big deal about this amazing democracy of occupations. Why? Because the brain, too, is a muscle and it’s nice—it’s more than nice, it’s thrilling—to see it exercised by people who have never shown up on Face the Nation or Ted Koppel, where all we hear from are the male and pale with their credentialed technoblab of “underclass” and “trickle-down”: the mellowspeak salesmen in their Beltway blisterpacks, pushing a capital gains tax cut as the pep pill/miracle cure for moral fatigue, social paralysis, and economic catastrophe.
Disappointed, hesitant, or driven as they may be, there’s no doubt at all that America would be a better place if everybody listened to these working people, not just radical-humanist Studs Terkel, that passionate old man with the brave songs and the magic hearing aid.