Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir

Preface to the New Edition

P R E F A C E T O P R E F A C E T O T H E N E W E D I T I O N HEN i SAT DOWN in the fall of 1995 to write the memoir that would become Mister Satan's Apprentice, I felt the pressures of what journalists were fond of calling "America's racial divisions" weighing on me like a clear and present danger. O. J. Simpson had just been acquitted in the killing of his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman. Many African Americans responded with glee, viewing O.J. as a latter-day Staggolee who beat the (white) system at its own game thanks to the brilliant forensics of his black lead attorney, Johnnie Cochran, and the overt racism of Los Angeles cop Mark Fuhrman. Most white Americans viewed the same acquittal with incredulity and rage. Not guilty? Were blacks crazy? Or were whites simply beginning to taste the crestfallen disillusionment in a "justice system" that black folk had known for far too long? Newsweek proclaimed, "Whites v. Blacks: Were We Watching the Same Trial? After the Verdict, the Two Communities Talked Past Each Other, with Passionate Misunderstanding." I was a second-year English graduate student at Princeton University when the verdict came in. Less than an hour after it arrived, w ix P r e f a c e to the New E d i t i o n I was sitting in Nell Painter's seminar on African American intellectual history, one of two white students in an otherwise all-black class, and I was filled with the same anxieties that always filled me in such settings. Those anxieties certainly weren't Professor Painter's fault: a brilliant, probing, and contrarian scholar, interracially married, a fan (she once confessed to me) of country music, she repeatedly challenged us to ask unsettling questions, counterintuitive questions, the questions nobody else was brave enough to ask. If I'd had the nerve, I would have asked the question that preoccupied me in those days, the same question a black man named Rodney King asked despairingly when another jury verdict three years earlier led to what were referred to as either the L.A. Riots or (if you were a hip leftist) the L.A. Uprising: "Can we all get along?" But I didn't have the nerve. Demoralized by an academic culture that seemed determined to see me as white, to reify whiteness as what Aaron David Gresson has termed a "spoiled racial identity," and to transform those who shared my race, class, and gender—straight white middle-class males—into emblems of racial bad faith, I'd lost my public voice, or whatever voice I possessed in the racially mixed classroom. But I had a book contract in hand and a story to tell. It was here, I swore to myself, that I would do what Nell Painter had insisted we do—go for broke. I'd write a book about the black men and women I had known and loved, the people I had known and loved and hated and learned from and gotten my heart broken by and made music with—white, black, whatever. I'd strive to represent both Uptown and Downtown as I had experienced them, the full catastrophe of a race-maddened New York that was also, and simultaneously , bubbling with transracial alliances that couldn't wholly be accounted for by the rhetorics of suspicion then fashionable in the academy. And I'd start exactly where I had started my own blues journey, with the smart, naive, lonely, and wild-hearted suburban kid I'd been back in my hometown of Congers, New York. To imagine that such a white boy—a prep-school townie, off to the Ivy League—would ultimately transform himself into a blues performer with any legitimate claim on the music was counterintuitive, to put it mildly. But here I was, Mister Satan's sideman, a touring pro with X P r e f a c e to the New E d i t i o n a Harlem pedigree and the respect of my peers. How had that happened ? Did I, in fact, have a legitimate claim on the blues? Or was I one more cultural thief, a ravenous and suspect racial adventurer of the sort eviscerated by bell hooks in her well...