BLACK & AMERICAN:WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
Thompson, Clifford
BLACK & AMERICAN: WHAT DOES IT MEAN? It means you learn to improvise Clifford Thompson W hen I left my adopted home of New York City to go to Spain, in 1991, I was twenty-seven...
...Richard Alleva SHIPS IN THE NIGHT "Amistad" & 'Titanic' ~ ell in advance of Amistad's release, the mills of publicity let us know that this film would confirm the new maturity Steven Spielberg had displayed in Schindler's List...
...I didn't witness or hear about any race-related violence...
...Think of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, Frederick Douglass and the abolitionist movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights struggle...
...At first race was not much of a problem--at least not a problem in the way I was used to thinking of it...
...Making one's way against the odds is a quintessentially American idea, and America's blacks are a quintessentially American people...
...and (3) that I should receive the same treatment in return...
...But in a nation as color- and origin-conscious as ours, such beliefs don't go far enough...
...His reaction was something I don't think could have occurred in the United States...
...What I needed was something that would connect the dots, something that would show me the full picture of my heritage as a Seder does for Jews...
...It doesn't have the moral complexity and layered characterizations of Beresford's Breaker Morant or the sense that the past is truly another country that made Black Robe and King David so excitingly strange...
...Calamity may be avoided for a down or two, but eventually...
...Baldwin had told me why he was an American...
...Whatever a white American high-school student might think of me, he has seen me before...
...Once I finally understood this, I listened to jazz with new ears...
...On the other hand, I didn't see enough black people on an average day to form a decent poker game, much less constitute a group large enough for the Spanish to have an attitude about...
...He lives in Brooklyn...
...The Seder made me understand, on a deep emotional level, that I needed to feel my roots, my connections to others...
...Sure, we laughed together over black fads, films, and hair-care products from the 1970s...
...It soon became apparent to me that being a black man in Europe was different from being a black man in America...
...I felt that if I was an American, I was one by virtue of being nothing else---an American by default...
...The Founding Fathers had created a set of rules and profited by them, along with much of the nation...
...Well, for one thing, it has made me secure enough in my own identity to explore other people's worlds...
...some of those we passed on the street tended to stare, but with curiosity, not hostility: the kinds of looks that a Barcelonan might get walking through the all-black Washington, D.C., neighborhood where I grew up...
...This is the stuff of the adult world, and Spielberg can only transform bits and pieces of this world into the material of his unique internal wonderland...
...The good citizen is awake inside the director but only intermittently feeds the dreaming child-artist...
...During the meal, everyone participated in the readings, which I found interesting and enjoyable...
...But all of that felt fragmentary, not like the solid earth on which a real tradition rested, but more like separate bits and pieces of information--set against a backdrop of slavery, poverty, victimization, and plain old bad luck--that finally did not cohere...
...the breath and earth of Ben Webster, the elegant buzz of Dexter Gordon...
...Later, his gaze wandering over the courtroom and taking in several objects at random--a naval officer's epaulet, a cane resting on a gentlemanly knee--Cinqu6 feels a revulsion verging on nausea...
...It was when the ceremonial portion of the evening was over and the after-dinner chit-chat began that a crushing realization came home to me...
...I still adhere to that system...
...It was in Europe that Baldwin found, much to his astonishment, that he was "as American as any Texas G.I...
...The rest of it is mildly interesting professional filmmaking...
...At twenty-seven we sense that certain things must be embarked upon soon or they will not be undertaken at all...
...I would do it...
...By contrasting himself with what he was not, Baldwin discovered what he was...
...Since I fancied myself a serious black writer, it seemed to me that to live abroad for a while was an important rite of passage...
...Of the writers whose work I knew then, James Baldwin influenced me the most...
...We began to question the purpose of just getting by in a foreign country...
...I didn't need this knowledge, whose purpose was to help me confront the challenges I faced as a black American...
...Aside from the opening, most of the best moments express the bewilderment, horror, and wonder the Africans feel at being transported to a New England that, for them, might as well be the far side of the moon...
...What hampered my search was that I looked on the matter as academic...
...each wanted to make America more than it was...
...What have I gained by such self-discovery...
...Of the seven or eight people present, we were the only non-Jews...
...And this time, ironically--after having searched for evidence of a unified tradition--I found that I was hearing each tune not as a collective sound but as the work of individual people...
...Jazz, simply put, was black resourcefulness set to music: both the product of and a metaphor for the black American experience...
...The first twenty minutes of Amistad are sheer magic...
...It means you learn to improvise Clifford Thompson W hen I left my adopted home of New York City to go to Spain, in 1991, I was twenty-seven years old--young, but not as young as before...
...Boiled down, my beliefs were (1) that aside from advantages or burdens placed on them by society, all people were essentially the same...
...In a tableau worthy of G6ricault, a little piece of Europe and a little piece of Africa silently regard each other in starlight on the Atlantic Ocean...
...After a month, Amy picked up some babysitting work...
...almost, dare I say it, a religion...
...That yearning for more found its way into music...
...James Baldwin had realized he was an American by going to Europe...
...The black American creators of jazz took existing musical forms and turned them inside out to make something entirely new...
...One afternoon, for example, I sat in my classroom waiting for three new high-school kids...
...And the following scenes of the attempt to get the Amistad back to Africa (with two hostage Spanish slavers covertly deflecting it toward North America) are eerily beautiful, especially the nocturnal moment when the slave ship, lights doused to conceal its identity, crosses paths with a European vessel, aboard which wellcoifed, wealthy passengers are enjoying a string quartet on deck...
...I asked myself...
...For me, listening to jazz became a revelation...
...The more I thought about it, the worse my mood became, and the quieter I got...
...What shared memory constituted our celebration of ourselves...
...I couldn't claim to be an expert on jazz, but I had listened to it and enjoyed it for years...
...The staging of the ensuing battle is everything it should be: exciting, sufficiently bloody, both exhilarating and foreboding...
...Now, with Murray's help, I saw that connection clearly...
...But it seems to me that what is great in the new movie (and some of it is great) resembles the sort of daydream a bright child might have right after an exciting hist o r y l e s s o n . What S p i e l b e r g has wrought is much simpler than what a sophisticated director like Bruce Beresford might produce...
...Amy and I hit town with no jobs, no apartment, and little knowledge of Spanish...
...dinners, dirt-cheap wine, and unrepentant smokers...
...If James Baldwin thought it was a good idea to go to Europe, that was enough for me...
...And certainly in Beresford's hands a multifaceted figure like Henry Clay wouldn't have been presented as the straightforward villain that Spielberg gives us...
...The first twenty minutes is all adventure and physical excitement--the very aspect of history that a child revels i n - - while the rest of the movie is concerned with trials, treaties, evidence, oratory, political conniving, crises of conscience, the letter and spirit of the law...
...For me, that meant living outside the United States...
...Each pushed the envelope a bit...
...ventually, it happened--and predictably, it came about through reading...
...had not found what I had sought in Spain--the key to how i personally fit into my native country...
...I am a gentle man...
...At twenty-seven, I felt it important to experience something similar...
...Baldwin went to Europe to find out how his experience as a black American "could be made to connect [him] with other people instead of dividing Ihim] from them...
...So, by fits and starts, Amistad grips and enchants...
...I had a job at a language school Clifford Thompson is a senior editor at the H. W. Wilson Company and a fiction writer...
...All that came later...
...It was not so much that I felt excluded from the conversation, but rather that I couldn't imagine participating in a similar evening with any of my AfricanAmerican friends...
...The full force of having failed to discover what and where I had come from and who I was had hit me...
...I have now begun to study the histories of other peoples, while continuing to bone up on my own...
...Because, had I given it any thought, I would have realized that I already had a way of doing this...
...by the time I left the Seder I felt capable of violence...
...I had not found those connections in Spain...
...But what was the black American equivalent of a Jewish camp song...
...I had read almost everything he had published, including his essay "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American...
...The sheer foreignness of this world into which he has been hurled torments him...
...I was not ignorant of black American history...
...How could it...
...Was there really no positive tradition that most blacks had in common...
...That is, I found a writer capable of giving me a complete picture of what it means to be both black and American...
...Yet, if the Amistad we've got is relatively simple (except for the director's technical virtuosity), even naive, parts of it are as unforgettable as the best illustrations (by N.C.Wyeth, say, or Leonard Everett Fisher) in a child's classic...
...Who knows, even if I never make it back to Spain, some day I may be invited to another Seder...
...Seeing a freed black drive a buggy through the streets of New London, the prisoners feel they are looking at a chief in his royal chariot...
...Spielberg's achievement (aided by the bluegray chill of Janusz Kaminski's phoCommonweal | 7 February 13, 1998...
...Best of all, this resourcefulness was not merely an idea and a history--it had been turned into a celebration...
...For the Seder had not only made me realize that I was without any sacred traditions: it made me see that I knew of no sufficient basis for such traditions...
...The Spaniards we dealt with treated us well...
...teaching English...
...to create art on the spot...
...backwoodsmen, keelboatmen, and prairie schoonermen.., become relatively safe when one sets them beside the breathtaking escapes of the fugitive slave beating his way south to Florida, west to the Indians, and north to far away Canada through swamp and town alike seeking freedom-nobody was chasing Daniel Boone...
...I had fallen for the sound of jazz without truly understanding the way in which it embodied my heritage...
...It didn't matter that I was trailing Baldwin four decades later, or that I was not particularly conscious of my own need to locate and define my Americanness...
...When the first one saw me, his expression-- before he had time to change it - - gave me a rough idea of how few blacks he had encountered...
...Albert Murray, the essayist, novelist, and cultural critic, author of The Omni-Americans, Stomping the Blues, The Blue Devils of Nada, and a half-dozen other books, helped me understand how I was one as well...
...Resourceful" means being "capable of devising ways and means" - - in a sense, being able to create a way where none exists...
...I did not know that what I then regarded as an intellectual and bookish quest--the search for my Americanness--would soon become a spiritual need: an almost desperate search for some way to make sense of my heritage...
...Jazz was even the subject of the novel I had begun in Spain...
...American descendants of Africans had followed those same rules, and added something uniquely their own...
...In January 1991, blissfully unconcerned with what might lie ahead, having quit my job and given up my Harlem apartment, I flew with my girlfriend to Barcelona, the city of wonderfully weird buildings, siestas, motorscooters, beer with breakfast, 10:00 P.M...
...After half a year, we were back in the United States...
...At some point during the evening, one woman commented to another, "It's cool that you and I just met but we have this in common...
...Trying to understand the white man's religion, Cinqu6 and a friend study the illustrations in a New Testament, perceive the horror and power of Christ's Crucifixion, and are then alarmed, as they are herded to court, to see how masts in the harbor resemble huge crosses...
...Our Seder...
...Finally, a woman turned to Amy and me and said, "You guys aren't holding up your end of the conversation...
...That plan had not worked for me...
...I marveled at the dexterity of the alto saxophonists Charlie Parker and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley and of the trumpeter Clifford Brown...
...I think it's a good way to deal with people, as far as it goes...
...And miracle of miracles, jazz was already a big part of my life...
...as a black man, I am part of his world...
...And for a black American to be in a white society without adequate mental defenses is like being on a football field without a helmet or shoulder pads...
...But once the Africans are captured by American sailors and brought to Connecticut for the first of three trials, the movie never again attains that level of sustained wonderment...
...Chester Himes had done it...
...Amy and I survived in Barcelona, but our preoccupation with just making ends meet left little energy to embrace Spanish culture or to find out about Spanish people...
...2) that I should treat any Commonweal | 5 February 13, 1998 person accordingly, until or unless that person gave me a reason to do otherwise...
...Through Murray's books, and through personal contact with him, I came to recognize and value the achievements of black Americans--the unique cultural contribution we have made to this country...
...Richard Wright had done it...
...The very first shot, a shadowy closeup of the revolt's leader, Cinqu6 (embodied by the immensely imposing Djimon Hounsou), as he strains to pick the lock of his chains, gives us an unforgettable picture of fettered strength, a sort of black Samson Agonistes, that both encapsulates the horror of slavery and alerts us to the fury about to explode...
...There was Kwanzaa, an annual celebration developed recently--too recently for me to have embraced it as a tradition...
...She also did some free-lance editing...
...That celebration is called jazz...
...Talk had turned to memories of Jewish camp songs and other shared cultural experiences, memories I did not have...
...I fell in love with the sound of the tenor saxophone---with the reverberations of Coleman Hawkins, the Spartan purity of Lester Young...
...As Murray wrote in The Omni-Americans, "The legendary exploits of white U.S...
...I knew the stories of individual achievement, the stories of Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and others, and I was proud of them...
...Whereas classical and popular musicians played the notes that were on the page, jazzmen--within the structure of a given piece of music--joined their instrumental Commonweal | 6 February 13, 1998 mastery with their powers of improvisation (resourcefulness...
...About all we had was our luggage and an open-ended reservation at a pension...
...Nor was I to remain in Spain long enough to do so...
...Murray reminded me of how, in the face of so much misery, my ancestors had demonstrated a remarkable resourcefulness...
...As the reminiscing continued, a sadness came over me...
...But unlike Baldwin, I had yet to discover to what extent my own sensibility was uniquely American...
...We moved from the pension to a series of apartments, and I was able to concentrate on my novel and to set about trying to make sense in Europe of what it meant to be a black American...
...I was the only black person, a fact that in itself made me neither happy nor unhappy...
...Only a great image-maker could have created the opening sequence of the revolt of the abducted Africans and their frustrated attempt to sail the slave ship Amistad back to their homeland in Sierra Leone...
...James Baldwin had done it...
...The night I was laid out on the American racial/ethnic playing field in April 1993, was when Amy and I (married by now) were invited to attend our first Seder...
Vol. 125 • February 1998 • No. 3
