The Gateways Festival Orchestra: The Color of Concert Music
Clarence Major: Whitman and the Roads That Lead Into Each Others’ Lives
Clarence Major (b. 1936) was born in Atlanta, but grew up on the South Side where, he says, “…the writerly disposition that was then evolving was shaped by my life in Chicago.” His wide-ranging styles—often praised for their mixtures of slang, history, avante garde experimentalism, vigor and gentleness—are rooted in the fact that while he remains firmly planted in Black culture and its South Side moods, Major has also shaped a truly international, cosmopolitan career and vision. “Paris! Why Paris? Why did I—or any African American artist or writer—go to Paris?” he asks in a recent essay. But he knows that, “Even before the end of slavery, free mulattos, some of them artists, were traveling to Paris…,” thereby establishing a tradition followed by hundreds of artists, dancers, musicians, and writers—including Beauford Delaney, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Major himself, whose 1985 book of poems Inside Diameter: The France Poems contains some of his most powerful work.
Among his many other books of poetry are Swallow the Lake (1970), Surfaces and Masks (1988), and the wonderful Syncopated Cakewalk (1974), from which the poems I included in my book Black Writing from Chicago come. He has also published books of short stories, novels, and a dictionary, the 1994 Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, and is also a noted painter, photographer, editor and essayist. In Black Writing from Chicago I also included his essay “Discovering Walt Whitman” from Necessary Distance. It is a wonderful counterpart to June Jordan’s 1981 “For the Sake of People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us,” where she calls Whitman “the one white father who shares the systemic disadvantages of his heterogeneous offspring….”
Major first discovered Whitman at 17 by himself because, he says, “Whitman was too revolutionary for South Side high schools.” He remembers, “sitting on the floor in the library on an Air Force base in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for two hours one day when it was below zero outside, reading and rereading Leaves. It kept coming back into my life.” Later, when he was working on the Dictionary of Afro-American Slang, he discovered Whitman still guiding him and quotes Whitman’s words: “Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its basis broad and low, close to the ground”—which, Major notes, “was not the symbol of degradation. It stood for all glory.”
Major values Whitman’s “openness, his emotional outbursts, his long lines measured against short lines, his healthy frankness in matters sexual and racial, his acceptance of his own body without the usual Puritan hang-ups, his natural understanding of who and what human beings are, what they amount to, living together in a society.”
One of the three Major poems I included in Black Writing from Chicago is—along with Carolyn Rodgers’ “Prodigal Objects”—one of my favorite moments in the entire book. In “Read the Signs,” Major speaks of the sky as “a long list of verbs” and the sea as “its table of contents”—wondrous images in themselves—but the poem ends:
Out of their cars,
people themselves are like bushes near water.
They drink it through their roots.
The background tension you feel
comes on because talking begins from fear.
These roads we use are actually dried-out rivers
that lead us into each other’s lives.
One realizes, then, that Clarence Major’s wide-ranging styles—his masterful mixtures of slang, avante garde, and more mentioned above—both carve out roads for different kinds of lives to enter each other, and also prove that they already have. In this and many other ways, Major establishes himself as one of Whitman’s most important heirs.
♦ Go to a list of Black Writers on this site.
♦ Go to the Black Writing from Chicago page, where you can also BUY the book.
Charles Johnson: Lessons Learned and Not Learned
Born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1948, Charles Johnson’s first books were collections of cartoons—Black Humor in 1970, and Half-Past Nation Time in 1972. He also writes screenplays. Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1986) is a collection of stories, and his highly regarded novels include Faith and the Good Thing (1974), Oxherding Tale (1982), and Middle Passage (1990), a brilliant portrayal of the sea voyages which brought slaves to the Americas. It won the National Book Award, and in 1998 Johnson received a MacArthur Fellowship. After graduating from Southern Illinois University, Johnson did Ph.D. work in philosophy at SUNY-Stony Brook. His style—which combines folk elements, a sure ear for the vernacular, and an exploration of Black history—is closely related to the neo-realism of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, though Johnson has stirred controversy by strongly urging Black writers to move beyond these writers. For Johnson a large part of what he advocates has to do with a more free-wheeling mixing of genres, time frames, and histories, and especially with his philosophical bent. “I am committed,” Johnson has said, “to the development of what one might call a genuinely systematic philosophical black American literature, a body of work that explores classical problems and metaphysical questions against the background of black American life.” Besides phenomenology a la Husserl, Johnson is also a devotee of Asian philosophy and the martial arts, and in some of his work—the story “China,” for example, from Sorcerer’s Apprentice—Johnson can be seen, as he says, “attempting to interface Eastern and Western philosophical traditions, always with the hope that some new perception of experience—especially ‘black experience’—will emerge….”
In my book Black Writing from Chicago, I included a story from Sorcerer’s Apprentice titled “The Education of Mingo,” a story with a perception of the black experience from another angle, both funny and horrifying. The story asks, What has the black man learned from observing white behavior? The white man in this case is named Moses Green, who 
undertakes to “civilize” Mingo, a bondsman he has bought at auction. “Now Moses Green was not a man for doing things halfway,” writes Johnson. “Education, as he dimly understood it, was as serious as a heart attack. You had to have a model, a good Christian gentleman like Moses himself, to wash a Moor white in a single generation. As he taught Mingo farming and table etiquette, ciphering with knotted string, and how to cook ashcakes, Moses constantly revised himself. He tried not to cuss, although any mention of Martin Van Buren or Free-Soilers made his stomach chew itself; or sop cornbread in his coffee; or pick his nose at public market. Moses, policing all his gestures, standing the boy behind his eyes, even took to drinking gin from a paper sack so Mingo couldn’t see it. He felt, late at night when he looked down at Mingo snoring loudly on his corn-shuck mattress, now like a father; now like an artist fingering something fine and noble from a rude chump of foreign clay. It was like aiming a shotgun at the whole world through the African, blasting away all that Moses, according to his lights, tagged evil, and cultivating the good.” What Mingo learns, however, is not what Moses had hoped. He learns something deeper than Christian platitudes and table manners: he learns the relationship of whiteness and violence.
Many black writers—James Baldwin, James Alan McPherson, Haki Madhubuti—have marveled at how blacks have remained so human under the thumb and tutelage of white violence—Baldwin speculating particularly on how whites must have wondered at the depths of black superiority that allowed them to endure without striking back. And this is so even in the face of the largely black-on-black violence we now see gripping some Chicago neighborhoods, for example, a violence targeted in Spike Lee’s film Chi-raq, a name that speaks volumes and has engendered much controversy. There certainly is a “Chi-raq,” to go along with a Ferguson, a Baltimore, a Charleston—to name just a few recent examples from a history of white violence against blacks that reaches far, far back, nearly to the first white footsteps on the continent. Contemplating this, one does wonder how blacks managed not to “learn” so much violence, at least not to practice it against whites. Some have connected black-on-black, Chi-raqi violence to suppressed rage, a “rage of the disesteemed” Baldwin called it. “All too often,” Leon Litwack writes in Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, “thoughts of revenge against whites found an outlet only in violence against blacks.”
The end of “The Education of Mingo” has Moses Green and Mingo fleeing an act of violence, the last lines of the story being: “‘Missouri,’ said the old man, not to Mingo but to the dusty floor of the buckboard, ‘if I don’t misremember, is off thataway somewheres in the west'”—a west where one day a town named Ferguson would be founded, just outside St. Louis.
♦ Go to a list of Black Writers on this site.
♦ Go to the Black Writing from Chicago page, where you can also BUY the book.