Posted on Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - 09:17 pm:

It was therefore fitting that Hampton, one of the most prominent of the new black colleges in the South, would seize on the symbol of Conjure in its attempt to reorient African Americans and their cultural traditions.

In 1878 Armstrong [Samuel Chapman Armstrong] sent out a circular letter to friends, interested parties, and subscribers to the school's newspaper, the Southern Workman, stating his intent to focus on the "curious prevalence of superstition among the colored people of the South." Armstrong requested eyewitness acounts of folk beliefs among blacks, and in particular, descriptions of root doctors and Conjurers.

The goals of the folklore society at Hampton were elucidated in an introductory statement by the teacher who helped to organize the group, Alice Bacon. Before the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society in 1897 she read a platform that proclaimed the folklore society "arose . . . not in enthusiasm for the collection of folklore" but "from a strong desire on the part of some of those connected with the Hampton work to bridge over, if possible, the great gulf fixed between the minds of the educated and the uneducated . . . The study of folklore would allow Hampton students "to enter more deeply into the daily life of the common people, and to understand more thoroughly their ideas and motives." Interpretation of the past through folklore was a tool for understanding the present conditions and prospects of blacks in the United States . . . Teachers and students in the folklore society were soon fully involved in preserving the memory of indigenous African American traditions, the substance of a usable past. ( -- Yvonne P. Chireau, Associate Professor of Religion, Swarthmore College)

Moses closed his eyes and bent down and took a pinch of the soil and ate it with no more thought than if it were a spot of cornbread. He worked the dirt around in his mouth and swallowed, leaning his head back and opening his eyes in time to see the strip of sun fade to dark blue and then to nothing. He was the only man in the realm, slave or free, who ate dirt, but while the bondage women, particularly the pregnant ones, ate it for some incomprehensible need, for that something that ash cakes and apples and fatback did not give their bodies, he ate it not only to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the field, but because the eating of it tied him to the only thing in his small world that meant almost as much as his own life. (-- Edward P. Jones, The Known World)

As Edward and I stroll through an outdoor market and pass a vendor selling dirt for human consumption, I mention that some African-Americans in the rural South have eaten dirt habitually for generations -- not just any dirt but dirt dug from favored sites -- and that there has been speculation that the habit was brought to America from Africa. (- Alan Huffman, Mississippi in Africa)

For those of us who are Caribbean, our prophetic vision of the past makes us hear ("the eye listens") the cry Black slave women would shout to each other: "Mangé tè pa fè yich pou lesclavaj" ("Eating the earth saves a child from slavery"), which refers to the belief that eating dirt could make women abort when they had been raped by their masters or those sent to do their breeding for them. (-- Edouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi)

Posted on Friday, November 19, 2004 - 03:14 pm:

The Rolls must have turned my head, because the car when it came -- fifteen minutes late -- was a disappointment. Such things do not usually trouble me. It was a dusty minicab, whose rear seat was covered in a nylon fur with a zebra pattern. But the driver, Michael, was a cheerful West Indian lad who took my case and made a fuss of sliding the front passenger seat forward for me. Once it was established that I would not tolerate the thumping music at any volume from the speakers on the ledge behind my head, and he had recovered from a little sulkiness, we got along well and talked about families. He had never known his father, and his mother was a doctor at the Middlesex Hospital. He himself graduated in law from Leicester University, and now he was going to the LSE to write a doctoral thesis on law and poverty in the third world. As we headed out of London by the dismal Westway, he gave me his condensed version: no property law, therefore no capital, therefore no wealth.

"There's a lawyer talking," I said. "Drumming up business for yourself."

He laughed politely, though he must have thought me profoundly stupid. It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.

Posted on Wednesday, November 24, 2004 - 06:17 pm:

"My first anxiety attack occurred during a Louis Armstrong concert. I was nineteen or twenty. Armstrong was going to improvise with his trumpet, to build a whole composition in which each note would be important and would contain within itself the essence of the whole. I was not disappointed: the atmosphere warmed up very fast. The scaffolding and flying butresses of the jazz instruments supported Armstrong's trumpet, creating spaces which were adequate enough for it to climb higher, establish itself, and take off again. The sounds of the trumpet sometimes piled up together, fusing a new musical base, a sort of matrix which gave birth to one precise, unique note, tracing a sound whose path was almost painful, so absolutely necessary had its equilibrium and duration become; it tore at the nerves of those who followed it.

My heart began to accelerate, becoming more important than the music, shaking the bars of my rib cage, compressing my lungs so the air could no longer enter them. Gripped by panic at the idea of dying there in the middle of spasms, stomping feet, and the crowd howling, I ran into the street like someone possessed."

-- Marie Cardinal qtd. in Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark

ANGELA DAVIS: I want to actually quote Robert O'Meally from his anthology, The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. And he says, "Somehow jazz is black music with the voices and values of U.S. Negro life and times even when nonblacks are playing it, for as literary historian Gina Dent has asserted, 'You don't have to be black to be a carrier of black culture.'" In the same breath, O'Meally's quote continues: "It is the music of the country that its creators, often with little affection, call home. Call it freedom music with a tragicomic black arc."

Posted on Wednesday, November 24, 2004 - 06:21 pm:

To compare Williams to Ellison and Baldwin would be to call him a Negro writer; as if race had anything to do with his genius.

Posted on Sunday, November 28, 2004 - 10:11 pm:

the bigoted Temperance leader Dr. Benjamin Rush . . . Dr. Thrush (the historic Benjamin Rush), a madman/rapist in addition to being a dangerous racist . . . (-- Joyce Carol Oates, John Edgar Wideman: Memoir and Fiction)

The Viginia General Assembly, responding to public outcry in the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, debated plans for the gradual abolition of slavery and the removal of all free persons of color from the Commonwealth. In the end, state legislators decided by a slim majority to defer action on such sweeping reforms and instead passed measures aimed at tightening control over the slave population. (-- Scott French, The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory)

The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding from his own group and unintentional bribes from the whites.

The colored people did not praise it. The white people did not buy it. Most of the colored people who did read Cane hate it. They are afraid of it. Although the critics gave it good reviews the public remained indifferent.

One-third Negro folk idiom, one-third ordinary middle class American idea and sentiment, and one-third spirit of the "machine-age" which, more and more, becomes not American but Occidental.

The road for the serious black artist, then, who would produce a racial art is most certainly rocky and the mountain is high. Until recently he received almost no encouragement for his work from either white or colored people. The fine novels of Chesnutt go out of print with neither race noticing their passing.

Robert A. Bone discusses a Negro author, Charles Chestnutt [sic], who wrote a novel, The Marrow of Tradition, around the time a great many of the better class of Negroes were reacting against two hundred years of slavery by trying to abandon almost all their "Negro traits." Chestnutt's [sic] novel shows the kind of attitude that was adopted by some. The "hero" is a refined Afro-American doctor, who is forced to share a Jim Crow car with dirty, boisterous, and drunken Negroes. He is revolted by these people, farm laborers, in the coach, and Chesnutt says, "These people were just as offensive to him as to the whites in the other end of the train."

This kind of hideous attitude in a Negro (and most of the Negro novelists of the time were quite close to Chesnutt in their social attitudes) could only stem from an acceptance of the idea of the superiority of the white man, or at least the proposition that the Negro, somehow, must completely lose himself within the culture and social order of the ex-master. It is another aspect of the slave mentality.

-- LeRoi Jones, Blues People

Posted on Monday, December 06, 2004 - 09:12 pm:

Roth's historical sin
In "The Plot Against America," the great novelist imagines a 1940s America devoured by anti-Semitism -- ignoring the brutal anti-black bigotry that actually existed.

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By Stanley Crouch
Oct. 11, 2004  |  "Both men continued to swear their innocence, but McDaniels ultimately broke down, his screams sending children scurrying to their mothers' sides. Once he'd confessed to the crime he was shot to death. Townes had his eyes gouged out with an ice pick and then was slowly roasted with the torch until he, too, agreed to confess. When he finally uttered the words the mob wanted to hear, he was doused with gasoline and set afire. Souvenir hunters would fight over severed testicles and strips of barbecued flesh."

-- David Levering Lewis, in a 2002 review, quoting Philip Dray from "The Lynching of Black America," where the typical denouement of a double lynching in the Mississippi Delta in 1937 is described.

Great artists can commit great sins of monstrous allegiance, of bigotry, of individual cruelty, but they can commit no greater sin than taking on the mantle of Alzheimer's when addressing major periods in American history. I say that because so much of what has become important in American life since the election of John Kennedy is about deepening the quality of national memory. We search through our files, our documents, our newspapers, our diaries and so on, to somehow know who and what we have been and when we were that repugnant or inspirational or duplicitous or confused. Or whatever. I say that because the subject of this essay is Philip Roth, who has committed a highly celebrated sin against history that would mean nothing if he were not one of our greatest writers, a pure flare of talent out of New Jersey.

Roth has been at war with stereotypes and the limits of assumed good behavior throughout his career. One could accuse him of thrilling at the idea of shocking the bourgeoisie or being responsible for forcing his public to know what happens when the girls slide out of their panties and the men climb out of their pants. He is our most prominent son of James Joyce, but he has also become one of our most adventurous writers in his last few fiction works. Roth is usually obsessed with the limits and the tears hidden by the compartmentalized aspirations of middle-class Jewish life, the rubber demands of the academy, and the disappointments of wealth and fame as experienced by a writer named Nathan Zuckerman, who critics are always sure is actually Roth himself.

Roth is a high-IQ jokester who delivers his punch lines with glass capsules of cyanide. He focuses on tales from below the belt and has always been most interesting, it seems to me, when he has moved into domains other than those in which he grew up or made a living before going on to receive his well-deserved celebration. He has been under attack from the dunderheads of the academy and those who do not have enough literary sense to understand that his politics did not come off the assembly line. Yet he has maintained his integrity by going his own way and taking the lumps that come of maintaining a singular vision. Roth is too intentionally crude for those on the right and too unforgiving of the laughing-gas ideology that those on the left assume should be taken seriously.

So what is Philip Roth's great sin and what does it have to do with the material quoted at the beginning of this piece? Simply this: His new novel moves along as though that bestial level of social bigotry was not a highly visible fact of American life at the time that "The Plot Against America" is imagined to have taken place, between 1940 and 1942. "Boo!" some will automatically say because the book has been so vastly praised, but they would not leap so quickly into that camp if they realized just how much the novel is now part of the ongoing complaint that Ralph Ellison raised to the level of masterpiece in "Invisible Man." Roth expects us to believe that the very deep hostility that white Southerners had toward black Americans, a hostility that had been supported by white Northerners either after the end of Reconstruction in 1877 or soon thereafter, would suddenly dissolve and transform itself into anti-Semitism because Lucky Lindy defeated Franklin Roosevelt in 1940.

This sort of simplemindedness is unacceptable from a man of Roth's gifts. Had any such thing happened, Jews would have first seen the proverbial handwriting on the wall: They would have begun to notice how much worse things were becoming for Negroes, whose communities would almost surely have been turned into actual ghettos that walled off the black population from the white. Negroes would have needed passes to get out and would have been required to return by a certain hour. One Jewish writer friend of mine says that Roth did not want to complicate what he apparently intended as a reiteration of the old song of Jewish suffering thrust in an American key. Not a good enough reason, if true. No serious writer, in the interest of simplicity, can avoid the heat and weight of a time in the past where he chooses to put his story. Another Jewish writer of Roth's generation recalls that there was always talk during those years of the Negro being "a buffer" between Jews and Christians, and that one could gauge the mood of the country by what was happening to them.

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of Roth's novel is its absurdly reductive vision. By implication, we are given to believe that even if the hysterical racism and violence toward black people had somehow magically disappeared from American life, Negro activists, writers and firebrands such as W.E.B. DuBois, Walter White, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Roy Wilkins, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston -- all of whom had repeatedly proved their moral courage by standing up to racism through their words or their actions, or both -- would have shuffled off into silence when anti-Semitism was put into policy. This adds an even grimmer substance of insult to this ethnically self-absorbed book.

The fulsome praising of this Roth novel is also a commentary on the lack of knowledge of American history by those who consider themselves literary people in our time. How could this book pass everyone at Roth's publisher without the unmentioned smell of burning flesh filling room after room until someone raised a question about the stench for which the novel had cut off its nose in order to avoid acknowledging? Let us be even more blunt: Would there be no protest if a great writer or dramatist or filmmaker were to find a marvelous story about Gypsies in German cities during the mid-1930s and create a work in which the Nazis became so hot at the Gypsies that their plight overshadowed an unmentioned anti-Semitism?

There may be an understandable -- however unacceptable! -- reason for this that goes far beyond the limitations of "The Plot Against America." Could it be that because Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, the Rev. Al Sharpton, the bad sportsmanship of too many millionaire black athletes, black street-gang violence, the bullshit scholarship of the worst of black studies, and the decadent, dehumanizing minstrelsy of gangster rap have created such quiet animus in our intellectual community that it is preferable to forget the savage racial history of our nation? I raise that question because in the summer of 2001, The New-York Historical Society presented "Without Sanctuary," a showing of lynching photographs that was the talk of the town, much as a similar show was when it was put on in Manhattan by the NAACP during the 1930s (some were so overwhelmed at the time that they fainted when faced with the unfathomable brutality of public murder). In November of 2002, David Levering Lewis assessed recent studies of lynching for the New York Review of Books. So there was plenty of fresh information about that time period, information that it is hard to believe everyone so easily forgot when reading "The Plot Against America."

The most important movement in American fiction, regardless of style, is about moving beyond ethnic provincialism in order to summon a more real and more complex world. In "The Human Stain," Philip Roth hit one out of the park. In this new one, he took to an old American tradition, the segregated baseball team, and became Casey at the Bat.

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About the writer
Stanley Crouch is a New York essayist, poet and jazz critic.