Chapter Fourteen

HIGHER INDIVIDUALISM

ABOVE OUR MODERN SOCIALISM, AND OUT OF THE WOR- SHIP OF THE MASS, MUST PERSIST AND EVOLVE THAT HIGHER INDIVIDUALISM WHICH THE CENTERS OF CULTURE PROTECT; THERE MUST BE A LOFTIER RESPECT FOR THE SOVEREIGN SOUL THAT SEEKS TO KNOW ITSELF AND THE WORLD ABOUT IT; THAT SEEKS A FREEDOM FOR EXPANSION AND SELF-DEVELOPMENT; THAT WILL LOVE AND HATE AND LABOR IN ITS OWN WAY, UNTRAMMELED ALIKE BY OLD AND NEW.

—“Of the Training of Black Men”

At my ten-year high school reunion, an acquaintance made mention of an article I’d recently written about growing up black in New Hampshire. He said my perception was skewed if I thought that he and anyone else at school had treated me differently because I was black. He said that, at least for his part, he had always treated me as a person and not as a black person, and he was hurt that I thought otherwise.

In the article he was talking about, I had written about my feelings of not being able to escape the color of my skin, while also not feeling comfortable living in it. But, perhaps this friend had a point. Maybe I had, in retrospect and unknowingly, turned my sense of insecurity as a regular high school teenager into an issue of race for no real reason. If no one saw me as black, then how could I be the victim of racial prejudice? I suddenly recalled a conversation from my senior year, when a friend had said to me, “Why is it always about race for you, Beck? I mean, give it a rest. It’s not all about race.”

Strangely, I don’t remember it ever being all about race for me in high school. I remember pushing race aside until I couldn’t push it anymore, or it wouldn’t let me push. I remember feeling marked by my skin color no matter how gregariously I tried to press my individual personality. I remember wanting a boyfriend and not having one despite being told more than once by the all white boys I went to school with and had crushes on that I was one of the prettiest girls they had ever seen. I remember that a friend walked out of a class we had together because of a racist remark made by the teacher, long before it had even occurred to me to respond. Later, I was questioned by that same friend as to why I hadn’t appeared more offended. I remember thinking then that if some of the things I was experiencing were not about race, then I must be an awful, unlovable, and unknowable person. But mostly, I remember thinking that I would be happy as heaven for it to not be all about race.

Not about race? Sign me up.

The truth is, it’s a lot of work for things to be all about race, and I wasn’t terribly interested in exerting too much effort when I was in high school. I wanted to be popular and to do well on tests and get invited to parties and be the kind of person that everyone thought was cool and fun to be around. I simply wanted people to see me. Neither, though, was it more admirable than that. It was not, as Du Bois exerted, the pursuit of a “higher individualism which the centers of culture protect.” I would, however, consider my teenage desire to be seen and known as a way of seeking “a freedom for expansion and self-development … that will love and hate and labor in its own way, untrammeled alike by old and new.”

Clarence Major, a true Renaissance man with gifted and celebrated talents as a painter, writer, and poet, could almost single-handedly represent the pursuit of higher individualism. His written work, for example, which includes several collections of poetry, a dictionary of African American slang, and experimental novels such as All-Night Visitors and Painted Turtle , clearly and with unfailing consistency presents an unusual voice, or voices, dynamic and ambitious, always with a great respect for the many and diverse leanings of the individual spirit.

Major resists the idea of being or producing anything inherently “black,” although he acknowledges that there are those who do, many of whom exist as characters in his books. In a review for the New York Times, Richard Perry wrote of Major’s earlier novel, My Amputations , that it was a book “in which the question of identity throbs like an infected tooth.” One might naturally assume then that such a palpable description of identity struggle would translate back to the author who wrote it. But Major crafts characters so uniquely themselves, so fully formed, that the more sensible assumption would be to credit Major’s genuine, multidimensional individuality as the foundation from which he creates the wholeness of others outside of himself.

Clarence Major

It’s been a while since I’ve read The Souls of Black Folk, but my feeling is that it spoke largely to the education of black people, and also to the relationship between black people and academic life. In terms of a higher individualism, I think what Du Bois was really getting at comes toward the end of the essay “Of the Training of Black Men”—“black men must have respect: the rich and bitter depth of their experience, the unknown treasures of their inner life, the strange rendings of nature they have seen, may give the world new points of view and make their loving, living, and doing precious to all human hearts.” What he was getting at, although he doesn’t say it explicitly, is that there is a responsibility on the part of what he elsewhere calls the “Talented Tenth”—a responsibility toward those less fortunate members of the race.

The meaning of the “Talented Tenth” can certainly be broadened in contemporary terms, but during the time that Du Bois wrote about it, I don’t think he was talking exclusively about elitism, even though in many ways, of course, he himself was something of an elitist. Du Bois had enough wisdom and objectivity to see beyond his own limitations as a person, far enough beyond to see the greater need for reaching past the difficulties of class. He hoped for a system of education that would generate not the kind of race consciousness that Booker T. Washington had in mind, whereby black Americans needed to be pulled up, but the kind of race consciousness that allowed for black Americans to evolve as individuals. It was a worthy go, but I don’t think it has happened to any satisfactory degree— perhaps for some people, but not in terms of the masses, no.

It’s a very complicated situation as to why black Americans at large have not been able to or have not chosen to pursue a path of higher individualism. Certainly racism plays a part, but there are other social issues at work—capitalism itself requires a large permanent underclass in order to function. And, unfortunately, black people have always been stuck in that underclass, and there have been all kinds of consistent forces at work to keep us there. In the arena of education, employment, and just about anywhere you turn, you are going to find forces working against efforts to change that disadvantage.

Du Bois, in his effort to change the conditions for black America, suggests the idea of modern socialism. American society may have always had a sort of socialist impulse within the capitalist construct, but it has never been able to fully realize that impulse. All you have to do is think about how difficult it is to get the government to approve medical care for everybody, a very simple matter, one that other countries have no problem with. It’s just a simple issue: People should have a certain amount of medical care.

Of course there are things about capitalism that have served me, yes, certainly, but I suppose ideally what I would like is some sort of happy wedding between socialism and capitalism. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I think that is the idea Du Bois was leaning toward all of his life, and by the time he moved to Africa, he was definitely all the way there. The core issue in Souls, and particularly in the passage about higher individualism, is about creating a kind of social and domestic environment in which the black individual can find nourishment—intellectually, artistically, emotionally, and aesthetically.

I have been lucky to make the kind of work I want to make, yes, but at what price? Whatever success I have, it wasn’t supposed to happen. Somehow, I was able to slip through. Of course I persevered, and talent is part of it, but a lot of people have talent. It wasn’t easy to create an environment for myself in which I could feel nourished. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, where the value system is no different from that which all America most cherishes—a value system driven by materialism and profit. You can’t succeed, certainly not as an artist, or a writer, or a poet, with those kinds of values. You can’t write with money in mind. You can’t paint with money in mind. You can’t create poetry with money as an objective. You can hope that there will be some kind of financial reward, but it can’t be central to your life if you want to be a creative person.

I survive pretty well now, and I have for a number of years, but in the beginning it was pretty much a hand-to-mouth existence. Fortunately, I came along at a time when universities were beginning to take writers under their wings, and I got into the system fairly early. I know that a lot of people felt then and feel now that the university is no place for an artist, no place for a poet, no place for a writer. But I disagree. It’s perhaps the only thing we have to offer in this country that provides a kind of safe haven for creative people. In the days of the Harlem Renaissance, there were other ways of being financed— patrons, for example. Now we do what we can do to get our work done.

Do I think there is a particular way of producing culturally black art? It’s interesting, because I was interviewing Jacob Lawrence some years ago, an interview that appeared in The Black Scholar, and I asked him the same question: “Is your art black art?” And he said no. I told him that I was surprised by his answer, and he said, “In America, anybody outside the culture can paint black figures. But because an African American is painting black figures, does that make it black art?” So, the only thing left is the stylistic, aesthetic issue. Lawrence did not feel that there were specific lines and colors that delineated African American art from American art. And I don’t either, no.

In terms of books and writing, I think that there is a kind of tradition that goes back through to the nineteenth century, looking at people like Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt, and then later Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Let me say this: You can identify ways of perception, ways of interpreting experience that could be considered uniquely African American. That said, I think it’s hard to separate out European influences. In America, anybody who sets out to make something, be it art or literature, will inevitably end up creating something that represents the cross-fertilization that occurred at the beginning of this country’s civilization. There’s no way to avoid it.

Ralph Ellison, for example, who many people feel was too hung up on European writers, wasn’t the only African American writer of his generation to look toward European writers as literary ancestors. This was true even of Richard Wright, who very often gets celebrated by Black Nationalists and descendants of Black Nationalists. Upon close scrutiny, you will find that his roots come from very diverse places and not just the African American experience. James Baldwin, too, comes more specifically from Henry James than any other literary figure, black or white.

Emphasizing that which is uniquely black and that which isn’t through art or books or magazines or churches, or whatever it may be, both nurtures black people and promotes a kind of separatism. Culture is an essential thing. One needs culture as a means of identifying who one is, where one is coming from, and who one aspires to be. At the same time, exclusive cultural identification is inherently limited. One of the beautiful things about evolving in the world is the possibility, the future, of an individual existence.

As Langston Hughes said about us, black people, in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” we are both beautiful and ugly, too. He meant it metaphorically, of course, but I have tried to remember that throughout my life, because as an artist or a writer, you can’t afford to forget the humanity implied in that statement. You have to keep a clear vision of the full human being. That’s what Hughes meant, and that’s what Du Bois meant.