Not Naming the Race: An Interview with Charles Henry Rowell

This interview was conducted on June 18, 2006, in Edge, TX, at the Dusty Creek Ranch.

JACKSON: You are the editor of Callaloo, but anyone who has read the very first issue of the journal would encounter you as poet. I want to begin our interview there—with you as poet. In that December 1976 issue of Callaloo, you published one of your poems entitled "Legacy":

Sometimes I think it was a dirty trick my grandfather played— leaving my mother his cane for her last-born son. Did he know I'd never walk straight?

Can you talk about not walking straight, following in the footsteps carved out for you by your father or grandfather, and about the road, so to speak, that leads from Auburn, Alabama, to Havana, Cuba.

ROWELL: And then to College Station.

JACKSON: Yes, and then to College Station, Texas.

ROWELL: It is so amazing that you would begin this interview with one of my very early poems, my juvenilia. Perhaps, readers of the first issue of Callaloo would think of me as a poet if they read some of my early efforts as a poet in that issue of the journal. I am almost embarrassed now to try to talk about that poem, which honors and gives thanks, however indirectly, to the ancestors.

Looking back now, I would say that the poem "Legacy" is autobiographical in spirit. And if I were reading that little poem now, I would say I have never followed the pattern or the directions or the life and cultural patterns my parents and grandparents expected of me. I refuse to follow anybody's expectations, even those of "the academy," which controls my profession and thus my professional employment. Had I followed the academy's expectations, I never would have been fool enough to found Callaloo or any other journal; I never would have elected to spend life and grow into very old age with a journal on my back. I would never have sacrificed my own creative writing abilities and my own educational training and scholarship as a literary critic to provide a continuing forum for others to publish their creative and critical writing. In other words, all my life I have refused to walk those straight lines different people have laid out for me to walk. I have always thought I should create my own lines or paths to follow.

I have always refused to become somebody else's notion of what I should be or what I should become—and that has always been central to my sensibility as I developed from childhood into adulthood. I could not, for example, become what my father wanted me to be: the great farmer or the great physician—or anyone who could make a lot of money; my father's world was grounded in materialism, which he thought defined a man's personhood. Without ever calling it by name, my father believed in "the American Dream," in spite of the white racism that prevented him from fully realizing the dream. My father's father and his grandfather (who had been enslaved) were landowners, who passed on to my father the heritage materialism, the ownership of property. To my father, his father, and his grandfather, a responsible man worked hard and acquired land and other forms of property, which ultimately guaranteed him self-sufficiency and money.

My mother's world was the opposite; her parents and grandparents were not landowners. Matters spiritual and beautiful or artistic were the center of her world. She lived in language; she was a great raconteur with an extraordinary sense of humor. She was also a great artist in her marvelous informal flower gardens. She was a great artist in our home, a world she arranged and designed for our pleasure and enjoyment. My mother loved beauty; it was central to her everyday life. I always remind myself that she was not able to become the great artist that she might have become had the White World not arrested her development—and that of legions of black...