Color: Essays on Race, Family, and History

Introduction

Introduction I began writing essays when my brother, Paul, died of alcoholism in 1982. By then, I had published six books of poems and had found poetry to be a safe harbor for my enthusiasms . Before 1982, I didn’t like sentences; they tended to go awry, and I wasn’t, in all honesty, self-confident enough in my own announcements to assail prose. Yet Paul’s death changed everything. In fact, I have only composed one poem since his loss—and it, interestingly, had to do with September 11, 2001, which, of course, was another great tragedy, with enormous resonance for me, a displaced New Yorker. After Paul’s death, something inexorably perished in me. It was the sense that the world could continue in the same vein, that what I had done before could survive. Heretofore , poetry for me was a sacred calling: the highest of the Arts. My difficult love for my brother—and it was blustery , indeed—involved the same spiritual anchoring. With his death went my desire to compose poetry. And yet I am a writer. And as a writer, I can only understand the world, alas, by writing about it. Walls, my first collection of essays, appeared in 1991. It took seventeen years to complete this second book. During the interim, both of my parents died of Alzheimer’s disease, 1 the world grew meaner, and I kept trying to write the best I could. Some people climb mountains, others reimagine the laws of physics; a writer, simply, writes. And for a black writer, authorship takes on even more salience. Historically, black people in much of the United States were not permitted to learn to read or write. Indeed, writing was a crime, and slaves were often murdered for attempting to master the alphabet. But we, as Frederick Douglass beautifully affirms, wrote ourselves into personhood, and often with a grace unmatched in American letters. And so, in every class I teach at Cornell, I tell my students—white and black alike—to write, write, write. It is not a matter of choice: it is a matter of existence. There are essays here about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s visit to our cottage in Martha’s Vineyard, my mother’s odyssey to have her racial designation changed on her birth certi- ficate, and my father’s difficult struggle as a black student to gain admittance to medical school in the 1930s, even though he graduated second in his class, in three years, from Boston University, with a major in chemistry. There is a reminiscence about teaching the profoundly handicapped at a superb public school; an essay about my parents’ mutual drift into Alzheimer’s disease; a paean to my parents’ love for musicals ; a disquisition on affirmative action; and a love note to the great poet A. R. Ammons, who taught me much. All of these essays concern race, although they, like the human spirit, wildly sweep and yaw. Since many of these essays were written as discrete pieces, they demand, as any selfreliant organism must, much contextual foregrounding; and so you will read about my father’s life, from numerous vantage points, in various essays. If they work, these essays attempt to celebrate how experience triangulates: how life, like a diamond, is the sum of its facets, each experience presenting a discrete shimmering, each, in some particularized way, amending and refracting the overall luminosity. For this reason , I often withhold bits of the narrative, for example, when 2 c o l o r I discuss my father’s medical school experience. In one essay you learn a great deal about his travail; in another, there’s an added insight, a slight qualification, a detail previously withheld . Some of this is intentional, having to do with narrative force and drama; some of this, truthfully, has to do with my own penchant for self-involvement. And some of this, of course, celebrates how the memory works. I hope these moments of narrative recapitulation are not too distracting. Memory, of course, refines and recalibrates, and this is a book about recollection, which is to say, it is a book about inference . To have two parents die of Alzheimer’s is to understand —and powerfully—the constitutive value of memory. We exist, largely because we insist on it. When my mother and father began to forget where we...