I had no idea why I was so absorbed in James Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room, but everyone else in the car knew. My father had been driving for so long he gripped the wheel with paper towels. It was 1967 and we were days from Indianapolis on our way to Disney Land. We were actually on Route 66 and I didn’t care. I was thirteen years old and I wasn’t causing trouble, sitting between my two sisters with Baldwin’s novel about a man’s love for another man in my face. I remember my mother glancing back at me. We’d driven through a dust storm a while ago, but I’d missed it.

Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth’s witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming—God grant me the grace to live them—in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night’s impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head.

Soon enough I had Another Country, Baldwin’s best seller, stashed away with what I considered porn. I’d not read his essays, because I knew that they were about race, a matter I was determined to put off for as long as I could. But the subject of race would not wait and in 1971 a teacher who understood showed me Baldwin’s “Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis” in The New York Review of Books. “The enormous revolution in black consciousness that has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America.” I come from preachers. I recognized that speaker.

Away and on my own at last, drinking and cruising, I read in my dorm room what I’d refused to at home. I fell under the spell of Baldwin’s voice. No other black writer I’d read was as literary as Baldwin in his early essays, not even Ralph Ellison. There is something wild in the beauty of Baldwin’s sentences and the cool of his tone, something improbable, too, this meeting of Henry James, the Bible, and Harlem. I can see the scratches in the desk in my room where I was reading “Notes of a Native Son,” Baldwin’s memoir of his hated father’s death the day his father’s last child was born in 1943, one day before Harlem erupted into the deadliest race riot in its history. I can feel the effects of this essay within me still.

However, there was a problem as new works by James Baldwin came out in the 1970s. They showed a falling off in his writing. His exhortations to the nation came across as perfunctory. Baldwin’s loss of his cool was a subject I thought I’d thought a lot about when in 1979 Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein suggested that I try to write about what would be his last novel.

Just Above My Head is a sprawling saga about a black gay gospel singer and his family. I am embarrassed more than three decades later by the knowingness of that review, from the typewriter of Mr. Little Shit. I was young, Baldwin was young no longer, and therefore I had his number. I eased scorn on what I saw as his sentimental portrayal of a gay couple. Because the two men in Baldwin’s novel consider themselves married, I accused him of having them imitate heterosexual behavior. He’d given up on sexual liberation, I said. Mary McCarthy advises that a good way to get started as a writer is to publish reviews. I was going about the business of trying to become a writer, willing to do so at the expense of this tender, brave, and brilliant soul.

A few years later at a party for Baldwin after he read his blues poems at the 92nd Street Y, I, drunk, asked—yes, asked—if he’d seen that review. He graciously said no and I’m afraid I can’t pretend that I did not in a seizure of self-importance rehearse some of my arguments against his book right there, in the middle of a cocktail party for him, this adored figure. His smile was all forbearance and understanding. He had my number. Then I was alone in the bedroom of Grace Schulman, the head of the Y’s poetry reading series. I heard a guy coming, Baldwin’s secretary, and simply stepped into Grace’s closet. Baldwin’s secretary sat on the bed and picked up the white phone. It was too late to say I was there, hiding among dresses with organdy sleeves. Minutes went by and after the secretary put out his cigarette, I went off into the unsteady dark.

James Baldwin died in France in 1987. His funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine was the first funeral I’d ever attended. In 1998, the Library of America published editions of Baldwin’s collected essays and his early novels and stories. The New York Review let me turn my reviews of these books into opportunities to make up for the past. I’d some experience and had more sympathy for the pressures in Baldwin’s life, especially toward the end of the civil rights movement. Suffering has everybody’s number, he once wrote. I remembered and tried to honor that Baldwin’s exalted prose had made me decide something about myself.

He was right about so much in our political and social culture, not to mention gay marriage and how liberating is the freedom to be like everyone else. I said then and say again that his voice has not aged; that the journey out of Egypt is his true theme; and that in the kingdom of the first person he has few peers.

James Baldwin has been on my mind all my writing life, as has The New York Review of Books, ever since 1973, when the great Elizabeth Hardwick, surprised I’d not read F.W. Dupee on Baldwin, which appeared in the very first issue, sat me down with a big red bound volume of the first decade of the paper. Part of its luck was to have been bought in the 1980s by Rea Hederman, a hero of liberal journalism in the segregated South.

Over the years certain names on the cover of the Review have made my heart race. I miss Barbara Epstein every day, as do all her family and many friends. I am humbled by the lessons of Robert Silvers’s dedication. I have received so much from this noble intellectual enterprise. I learned of that English poet James Fenton from the pages of The New York Review of Books.

This is the wind, the wind in a field of corn.
Great crowds are fleeing from a major disaster
Down the long valleys, the green swaying wadis,
Down through the beautiful catastrophe of wind.

I thought, Whoa, and I still do, even after twenty-three years of making him cups of tea. And so thank you.

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Darryl Pinckney remembers Elizabeth Hardwick’s portrait of Billie Holiday, which first appeared in the March 4, 1976 issue of The New York Review, and later as a chapter in her book of autobiographical fiction, Sleepless Nights.

When Elizabeth Hardwick was in New York in the 1940s, practically everybody called her Lizzie. Harry May called her Elizabeth. They’d been in graduate school together at Columbia. He’d dropped out before her. They’d found each other again after her husband, Robert Lowell, left in 1970. Lizzie said that Harry used to say his ambition was to sink into the lower classes and that was what he’d done, living out his life among railroad men in Virginia, in love with them. I think of 1975 and remember a tall, silver haired gentleman. I’m like you, he said, I think Elizabeth is the bee’s knees. Harry, she said, and blew a kiss across the room.

She had a way of dusting off a record on the backside of her skirt. I could not learn the box step, but Harry guided her around her living room, and when they broke apart, they were inclined toward each other, bent at the waist, dropping into easy recall of the dance moves of their era. They cut a rug to Ella and Louis, but when Lizzie dusted off a Billie Holiday record, she sat and concentrated, even on up tempo numbers, often with her chin in her palm and her elbow atop her crossed leg. Louis Armstrong taught everyone how to sing behind the beat, she said. She liked Billie Holiday’s early recordings, from 1935, say, but it was the Billie Holiday of the 1940s whom Lizzie preferred. Those were the years of Lizzie’s independent life in New York, of clubs on West 52nd Street and romances. I once brought her a record of Billie Holiday’s late sessions and she made me turn it off right away, the sound of what to her was a ruined voice was too painful.

She told me that in her back-when she and a friend used to search through boxes in record stores until their fingers bled and, lo, there that detail was in 1976, in the manuscript of the Billie Holiday chapter of Sleepless Nights, as well as other things she’d said, like how their hearts pounded when they with their pale faces went up to see the great singer in Harlem. She was writing fiction about her life, not autobiography, yet the emotional truth of her experiences was important and sometimes to remember consoled. Another classmate, Greer Johnson, not Harry May, was the model for J. in that chapter. Johnson had been her roommate in the Hotel Schuyler on 45th street. J. is something of a fairy and longs for the love of what she calls a normal man. I argued, but she insisted that that was true to his psychology, his vintage.

Lizzie really minded the sentimentality going around then, the 1970s, about Billie Holiday as a woman who’d lived her songs, the whole Lady Sings the Blues thing. In her portrait of Billie Holiday, she wanted to evoke a singularly conscious individual, someone who had worked to perfect her art, a singer who knew what she was doing, a supreme musician. She also wanted to get across the tremendous force and sophistication of Billie Holiday’s character, her willfulness, and the size her alcohol and heroin addictions had to become in order for them to cut her down. Billie Holiday was nobody’s victim and held no one responsible for her choices. The bizarre deity—she adored Baudelaire’s phrase about his brown-skinned mistress.

Once, completely blotto, I read aloud Frank O’Hara’s ‘The Day Lady Died,’ and Lizzie said that Cal liked for her to play her jazz records, but he didn’t really get them. Their daughter Harriet did. Lizzie said that you can listen to opera by yourself, but not certain kinds of jazz. You had to have someone with you when you listened to Billie Holiday, for instance. Otherwise, you might kill yourself. But then you might want to shoot yourself if you were listening with the wrong person, so why not have another.

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Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964), enthusiast of Modernism and ally of the Harlem Renaissance, had a swell time while the Roaring Twenties lasted. Maybe he had too good a time—man about town, his big-toothed smile not to be missed at important theater openings and literary events, then on to suppers and cabarets. “Up at 8 with quite a hangover,” Van Vechten typically notes in his small daybook. He ceased his binge drinking as the Jazz Age turned into the Great Depression and he also stopped writing fiction. His dear friend Gertrude Stein had been right not to take his novels of decadence too seriously. Yet Van Vechten would have the Second Act that American life is not supposed to grant. He re-created himself as an artist and he became a portrait photographer of historical importance.

Van Vechten came from a sort of rich family, and perhaps that was the source of his social confidence. He did not repudiate his class, but he did not hang out in his class much either. In his marriage to Fania Marinoff, a Jewish waif of the theater, he found genuine companionship as well as an accommodation, however pained, of his gay love life. He’d made his way east, from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to the University of Chicago, and finally to New York, where he worked as a music reporter, cultural journalist, herald of the new in the arts. Soon enough, he had black people at his parties on West 55th Street, parties that would become as legendary as those of his new friend, the “hair cream heiress,” A’Lelia Walker. Paul Robeson knew that something important had happened for him when in 1924 he sang at one of Van Vechten’s evenings; many other black musicians would as well. His home became something of a cultural clearinghouse for the Harlem Renaissance.

Van Vechten took to Zora Neale Hurston and especially to Langston Hughes. Biographies tell us that Hughes didn’t doubt Van Vechten’s sincerity, but he worried nevertheless how their connection would look in Harlem. Countee Cullen would eventually sit for Van Vechten, but in the 1920s, as a young black poet who believed he could write a lyric poetry that was color-blind, an escape from race, he kept his distance from the man who was already controversial as a white patron of black artists. Van Vechten waged his personal crusade of mediating between black and white, introducing here, facilitating there. But he found himself at the center of the debate about the image of the black in America with the publication of Nigger Heaven (1926), his roman à clef about the Harlem Renaissance.

Van Vechten’s characters are based on the black friends he’d made in uptown literary and show business circles. However, Nigger Heaven was also sensational, as a story set in the steamy Harlem scene of cabarets and seduction, speakeasies and violence. W.E.B. DuBois and several other black critics saw Van Vechten as the latest in a series of whites who exploited black culture for commercial gain, and whose work did little more than reinforce stereotypes. Yet Van Vechten’s black friends defended Nigger Heaven, or at least his good intentions. If the educated young black couple at the center of his novel is naive, then that is also the innocence of the period, given how we in the present day think of race. In a sense, Van Vechten was like the black writers who had lost their social context. But he was also, like Hughes, a survivor. The Mexican painter Miguel Covarrubias introduced him to the Leica in 1932 and he was off.

“I stay in New York and have become completely a photographer,” he wrote to Langston Hughes, then in Russia, in 1932. Hughes was happy to tell him a year later that he put Van Vechten’s picture of Ethel Waters up on his workroom wall. Van Vechten sent him photos of Ada “Bricktop” Smith and Louis Armstrong to make up for not having liked Hughes’s proletarian poems. He would go on over the years sending Hughes photographs of Ethel Waters and other friends, printed-up postcards of an attractive merchant seaman or the great, exhausting Billie Holiday, whom he won over by showing her his portraits of Bessie Smith. Van Vechten’s letters to Hughes tell us that he felt connected to the artistic world through his photography.

Van Vechten took thousands of photographs, of which those of black people are only a fraction. These portraits are perhaps his most personal work. His interracial homoerotic photographs are unquestionably more private, but they are far from relaxed, have none of George Platt Lynes’s calm. But the first thing Van Vechten’s photographs of black people speak of is his talent for friendship. Even when the subject’s gaze is averted, as in Van Vechten’s 1936 portrait of Lottie Allen, described as a domestic worker, her “dates unknown,” the viewer believes that she, who appears to be in uniform, trusts the white man behind that camera. She is not submitting, her expression is surprised, shy, pleased, and consenting.

Van Vechten’s admiration for his subjects was unambiguous. They knew who he was. Ten years after the Nigger Heaven controversy, DuBois did not refuse him, but he does not look particularly cooperative in the photograph. That is more likely to be a pair of glasses tucked away at the last minute on the end of that string than a Phi Beta Kappa key. The photograph was taken in 1936, when DuBois had resigned from The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP, and published his groundbreaking history, Black Reconstruction in America. DuBois’s economic interpretation of the post-Civil War period was widely criticized by historians at the time.

Similarly, Van Vechten’s old friend, James Weldon Johnson, does not look comfortable in his portrait from 1932. Van Vechten got a much more interesting photograph of Johnson’s brother, the composer J. Rosamund Johnson, the following year. But, then, James Weldon Johnson, born in 1871, was a race man, as the middle-class progressive black leaders of the Victorian and Edwardian eras called themselves. It’s as though Van Vechten could not overcome Johnson’s prior relationship to the camera, to Negro portraiture itself. The image of respectability is paramount. Only Mildred Perkins, a domestic worker photographed in 1937, and Arna Bontemps, photographed in 1939, are as reserved.

Van Vechten’s portraits of an inscrutable Zora Neale Hurston, a vulnerable Bessie Smith, Langston Hughes in a dapper hat, and Richard Wright in a jacket too big for him have been reproduced often. If Rose McClendon was a dramatic actress, then Van Vechten wanted her to have her characteristic nobility of expression. At the same time, he gives us impressions of some figures that are different from how we are used to seeing them. His Nora Holt, the jazz and concert pianist on whom he based the notorious man-eater of Nigger Heaven, is elegant, but older than her years.

W. C. Handy and Paul Robeson are smiling; the tenor Roland Hayes, who suffered indignities when he toured the South, looks like a winged creature from an opera. Margaret Walker was young and had just won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 1942 when Van Vechten caught her at an odd angle, photographing her somewhat from above, so that the viewer spies her gaze and can never intercept it. That is, indeed, a Phi Beta Kappa key that Countee Cullen is wearing, he, outdoors, framed by thick leaves.

Van Vechten photographed an elite. These were Negro achievers, ambassadors of the black race. Van Vechten shows the fire in legendary contralto Marian Anderson’s eyes, she who proved to the nation that a black woman could be more of a lady than the Daughters of the American Revolution. Charles Johnson and Mary McCleod Bethune were institution builders, presidents of black colleges, Fisk University and Bethune-Cookman College respectively, and would have been as celebrated in black America in the late 1940s as much as Ella Fitzgerald. Van Vechten finds Fitzgerald playful, mischievous. He captures her modesty, this consummate musician. She had perfect pitch and a faultless sense of rhythm; she reminded audiences that the human voice was an instrument.

Photography in the nineteenth century had its realists, but photography as a tool of social science and anthropology was also used to reinforce the tenets of racism. Early film as entertainment was far worse, given that Eastern European immigrants were shown what attitudes as Americans they ought to have toward blacks. The threat of ruin and violence was so real in the early twentieth century, when ninety percent of the black population lived in the South, that it was easy to mistake conformity to racist images on the part of black people for the way they really were. Whites couldn’t imagine what blacks had to do to survive. “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem begins.

But with the migration to the North, and the political change that came with World War II, with black veterans not willing to accept what had happened to their fathers after World War I, the country began to see and hear black people as themselves. It was a cultural movement that through his photography Van Vechten both witnessed and abetted. In remaining true to the cause, he discovered his best self.

Adapted from Darryl Pinckney’s introduction to ‘O, Write My Name’: American Portraits, Harlem Heroes, a collection of photographs by Carl Van Vechten, published this month by Eakins Press Foundation. Copyright Darryl Pinckney/Eakins Press Foundation, 2015.

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In Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again,” a poem published in 1936, a narrator speaks for those who struggle—the poor white, the Negro bearing slavery’s scars, the red man driven from the land, the immigrant clutching hope—and he offers the consolation, the defiance, of the young man, the farmer, the worker, united in demanding that America become “the dream the dreamers dreamed,” “the land that never has been yet.” Hughes addressed rallies of thousands in the Midwest and predicted that because the Depression had been so traumatic, mainstream America would go to the left politically. He got it wrong and spent the next two decades coping with the fallout, professionally, of having been sympathetic to communism.

Hughes was a panelist alongside Richard Wright at the National Negro Congress in Chicago in 1936, but two years later in “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” Wright dismissed the Harlem Renaissance writers as part of the black literary tradition of prim ambassadors who “entered the Court of American Public Opinion dressed in the knee-pants of servility.” Hughes was so identified with the Negro Awakening of the 1920s that he seemed to Wright to belong to an older generation, though there were only six years between them. Wright got his start publishing in leftist magazines and although he toed the Communist line of working-class solidarity that conquered race difference, and could envision in his early poetry black hands raised in fists together with those of white workers, the spirit of his revolt had very little of Hughes’s Popular Front uplift. His feelings were much more violent.

In “Between the World and Me,” a poem that appeared in Partisan Review in 1935, Wright’s narrator imagines the scene of a lynching:

And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms.
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me….

There was a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly upon a cushion of ashes.
There was a charred stump of a sapling pointing a blunt finger accusingly at the sky.

Wright’s “I” recalls that the passive scene has woken up. “And a thousand faces swirled around me, clamoring that my life be burned.” “They” had him; his wet body slipped and rolled in their hands as they bound him to the sapling and poured hot tar:

Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a baptism of gasoline.
And in a blaze of red I leapt to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs.

The poem’s last line shifts to the present tense. The speaker is now dry bones, his face “a stony skull staring in yellow surprise at the sun.”

Wright was not the first to treat the site of a lynching as a haunted place. Hughes himself wrote more than thirty poems about lynching, investigating the effects on families and communities. But “Between the World and Me” doesn’t draw a moral from having contemplated the grisly scene. There is no promise of either redemption or payback. The poem concentrates on the violence to the black man’s body, on trying to get us to step into the experience of his “icy fear.”

The black struggle in the US has a dualist tradition. It expresses opposing visions of the social destiny of black people. Up, down, all or nothing, in or out, acceptance or repudiation. Do we stay in the US or go someplace else, blacks in the abolitionist societies of the 1830s debated. We spilled our blood here, so we’re staying, most free blacks answered. Some people now say that maybe Booker T. Washington’s urging black people to accommodate segregation saved black lives as he raised money to build black educational institutions. Marcus Garvey recast segregated life as the Back to Africa movement, a voluntary separatism, a black nationalism. W.E.B. Du Bois battled Garvey as he had Washington, but by 1933 Du Bois gave up on his militant integrationist strategies, resigned from the NAACP and The Crisis magazine, embraced black nationalism, and in 1935 published his landmark history, Black Reconstruction in America. Which is better: to believe that blacks will achieve full equality in American society or to realize that white racism is so deep that meaningful integration can never happen, so make other plans?

Wright was condescending about Hughes’s gentle autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), as was Ralph Ellison, who, then in his Marxist phase, complained that the poet paid too much attention to the aesthetic side of experience. Ellison praised Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy (1945), but the spectacular success of Wright’s novel Native Son (1940) drove him to be as different from Wright as he could in Invisible Man (1952). They both broke with the Communist Party in the early 1940s but saw themselves as opposites. Wright moved to France in 1946 in the mood of an exile, the black intellectual alienated from US society, while Ellison remained at home, the artist sustained by what he saw as a black person’s cultural ability to keep on keeping on.

In later years, Ellison remembered Wright, six years his senior, as a father figure whom he had quickly outgrown. But Wright’s example inspired the young James Baldwin to move to Paris in 1948. Wright was hurt when Baldwin declared his independence from the protest tradition by denouncing Native Son. Baldwin later defended his criticisms, arguing in part that Wright’s concentration on defining his main character by the force of his circumstances sacrificed that character’s humanity. Baldwin’s turn would come in Leroi Jones’s essay collection Home (1965), in which he sneered at Baldwin for being popular on the white liberal cocktail circuit. Worse was in store for Baldwin, the understanding queer in a time of narrow macho militancy.

Jones, on the verge of reinventing himself as Amiri Baraka, fumed about the “agonizing mediocrity” of the black literary tradition. For him, the Harlem Renaissance had been too white, and never mind that Hughes in his manifesto, “The Negro and the Racial Mountain,” published in 1926, had proclaimed the determination of members of his generation of black writers to express their dark-skinned selves without apology. If black American history can be viewed as the troubled but irresistible progression of black people toward liberation, then it would appear that every generation of black writers redefines the black condition for itself, restates the matter in its own language. “There has always been open season on Negroes…. You don’t need a license to kill a Negro,” Malcolm X said.

The fatalism of 1960s black nationalism and the wisdom of not believing America’s promises form part of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s intellectual inheritance from his father. Not only is Coates’s memoir The Beautiful Struggle (2008) a moving father-and-son story, it is an intense portrait of those whom the black revolution left behind, but who never broke faith with its tenets nonetheless:

Even then, in his army days, Dad was more aware than most. Back in training he’d scuffled with a Native American soldier, who tried to better his social standing by airing out the unit’s only black. After they were pulled apart, Dad walked up to his room, calmed down, and then returned to the common area. On a small table, he saw a copy of Black Boy. He just knew someone was fucking with him. But he picked up the book….
In Richard Wright, Dad found a literature of himself. He’d read Manchild in the Promised Land and Another Country, but from Wright he learned that there was an entire shadow canon, a tradition of writers who grabbed the pen, not out of leisure but to break the chain….
Now he began to come to. When on leave, he stopped at book stands in search of anything referencing his own. He read Malcolm’s memoir, and again saw some of his own struggle, and now began to feel things he’d, like us all, long repressed—the subtle, prodding sense that he was seen as less. He went back to Baldwin, who posed the great paradox that would haunt him to the end: Who among us would integrate into a burning house?

Coates’s father was discharged from the military in 1967 when he was twenty-one and went to work as a baggage handler and cabin cleaner at the Baltimore airport. The early civil rights movement had taken place on television, southern and religious, remote from him. But his “new Knowledge” was his line drawn in the sand and to him Gandhi was “absurd” because “America was not a victim of great rot but the rot itself.” Coates tells us that while reading newspapers left behind on planes from the West Coast, his father discovered the Black Panthers. “My father was overcome.” In 1969, he offered himself to the Baltimore chapter, eventually becoming its head after he lost his job because of his arrest for moving guns.

Three years later the Panthers were falling apart, an organization wrecked by the FBI, paranoia, arrests, purges, factional disputes, murder. His father, Coates writes, was not the insurrectionary/suicidal type and his chapter had been more like a commune. “When he woke in the morning he thought not of guns but of oil, electricity, water, rent, and groceries.” Local chapters had financed themselves through the sale of the Panther newspaper and after every Panther chapter except the one in Oakland had been shut, initiatives such as free breakfast for children or clothing distribution programs stopped. Foot soldiers were left to languish in prisons; damaged souls lost the refuge, the fantasy, of hanging out with the revolution. The remaining national leadership harassed Coates’s father when he quit, but he “left the Panthers with a basic belief system, a religion that he would pass on to his kids.”

Coates says that his father, a survivor, was more suited to the real world than he knew and he founded his own propaganda machine, including a bookstore, printer, and publisher, calling it the George Jackson Movement, after the Black Panther who was shot trying to escape from San Quentin State Prison. His father’s storefront was the church that Coates, born in 1975, grew up in, forced to study works of black history known only on the black side of town.

But it was music that set him on the path to consciousness, knowledge. Coates was twelve when he heard Eric B. & Rakim’s “Lyrics of Fury.” From trying to write his own rap, his relationship with and curiosity about words extended to his father’s shelves. “That was how I found myself.” He learned that his “name was a nation, not a target.” “When I was done, I emerged taller, my voice was deeper, my arms were bigger, ancestors walked with me, and there in my hands, behold, Shango’s glowing ax.”

His father met his mother in what they saw as a revolution. They were the kind of parents who found summer programs to put the kids in, college prep classes to enroll them in, and decent high schools outside their school district, and they started practice sessions for the SAT. They not only showed up at PTA meetings, they sat in on Coates’s classes when they felt they had to. And it wasn’t just them. His coming-of-age story includes teachers who also had been changed by the revolution in black consciousness. The school facilities were inadequate, but the teachers pushed students who didn’t understand what they were talking about when they begged them not to waste their chances. All that mattered in Coates’s high school world were girls, clothes, the mall, territory, styling, fights, gangs, homies, reputation, staying alive in West Baltimore, and the music. Black male adolescence had its soundtrack.

When Coates put his hand in his English teacher’s face, Coates’s father came to school and knocked his son down:

My father swung with the power of an army of slaves in revolt. He swung like he was afraid, like the world was closing in and cornering him, like he was trying to save my life. I was upstairs crying myself to sleep, when they held a brief conference. The conference consisted of only one sentence that mattered—Cheryl, who would you rather do this: me or the police?

Coates says that it took him a while to realize how different his family was. They boycotted Thanksgiving, and fasted instead. Most of his friends were fatherless, around him the young were getting locked up, dying of gunshots, and crack brought the end of the world. His father’s Afrocentric publishing business succeeded somewhat, but he also did what he had to, including beekeeping. He held on to jobs as a janitor at Morgan State, a black college, and as a research librarian at Howard University, some ways away in Washington, D.C., just so his children could have free tuition. “What did I know, what did I know/of love’s austere and lonely offices?” Robert Hayden asks himself in his poem about his father, “Those Winter Sundays.” But Coates dedicates The Beautiful Struggle to his mother. His father had a few children by other women. One year he became a father by two women at the same time.

In his writings, Baldwin stressed that the Negro Problem, like whiteness, existed mostly in white minds, and in Between the World and Me, Coates wants his son, to whom he addresses himself, to know this, that white people are a modern invention. “Race is the child of racism, not the father.” He admits that he is haunted by his father’s generation, by a sense if not of failure then of something left unfinished. He wants to go back. He named his son after Samori Touré, the nineteenth-century Islamic ruler who resisted French colonial rule in West Africa, writing, “The Struggle is in your name.”

The struggle is what he has to bequeath to his son and although he tells him that he hasn’t had to live with the fear that Coates himself did at age fifteen, he’s sure his son understands that there is no difference between him and Trayvon Martin as a youth at risk because he is black in America. His body is not his own; it is not secure. He can be destroyed by American society and no one will be held responsible.

In American history Coates finds the answer to why he believes the progress of those who think themselves white was built on violence and looting, on stolen black bodies. People were Jewish or Welsh before they were white. The Irish used to be black socially, meaning at the bottom. The gift of being white helped to subdue class antagonism. Coates wants his son to know that government of the people had not included his family before, that American democracy is self-congratulatory and white people forgive the torture, theft, and enslavement on which the country was founded.

The way Coates himself grew up was the result of policy, of centuries of rule by fear. Death could come out of the afternoon, in the form of a boy who idly pulled a gun on him. Fear and violence were the weaponry of his schools as well as his streets:

I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered ’round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away.

And maybe it is his understanding of this fear that lets Coates explain in an exculpatory fashion the severe beatings he regularly got from his father. Meanwhile, television sent him dispatches from another world of blueberry pies and immaculate bathrooms. He sensed that “the Dream out there,” the endless suburbia of “unworried boys,” was connected somehow to his fear.

Certain people will do anything to preserve the Dream. They want to believe that the past has little effect on the present. As Coates puts it:

“We would prefer to say such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any,” writes Solzhenitsyn. “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.” This is the foundation of the Dream—its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works…. The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one’s eyes and forgetting the work of one’s hands.

Coates is glad that his son is black. “The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.” The experience of being black gives a deeper understanding of life than that afforded to those stuck in the Dream. “They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.” For Coates, black history is “our own Dream.”

In The Fire Next Time (1963), Coates’s literary model for Between the World and Me, Baldwin addresses his nephew and tells him early on that “you can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.” Baldwin’s polemic is unforgiving of America. He then goes on to describe the frustration of black people through a visit to the Chicago headquarters of the separatist Nation of Islam. In The Fire This Time (2007), a memoir of being black and gay in the South, Randall Kenan addresses his nephew, telling him that there is much discussion about what it means to be black and that as bad as things still are, a new class of “black folk” has emerged, the “bourgeois bohemian,” “a black intelligentsia given new and larger wings by meritocracy.” Coates, however, is confessing to his son that he, his father, cannot ultimately protect him.

He is aware of the anger in him and recalls that when his son was five they were leaving a movie theater on the Upper West Side and he nearly went off on a white woman who shoved his son because he wasn’t moving fast enough. He got into a shouting match with the white parents around him and then agonized over his uncool behavior. “I have never believed it would be okay.” The future was in our hands, Baldwin warned.

Coates wants his son’s life to be different from his, for him to escape the fear. He is pained by his son’s disappointment when the announcement comes that no charges would be lodged against Michael Brown’s killer in Ferguson. Coates urges his son to struggle, but not for the American Dreamers, their whiteness being “the deathbed of us all.” Coates remembers how “out of sync” he felt with the city on September 11, 2001. Race may be a construct, but his resentment at its damage is deep. He also says that he has never felt comfortable with the rituals of grieving in the black community. His parents weren’t just nonreligious, they were anti-Christian.

Some critics of Between the World and Me have noted that Coates offers no hope, or doesn’t believe that black people can shape their future. “It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love,” Baldwin said. Maybe Coates’s lack of belief in “agency,” why he sees us at the mercy of historical forces, is explained by the case of a Howard classmate, Prince Jones, a Born Again Christian and the son of a physician, who in 2000 was killed by a police officer who had stopped his jeep in Fairfax County, Virginia. The policeman was the only witness to what happened, which was never fully explained. Fairfax authorities decided not to prosecute the officer, but the officer was from Prince George’s County, Maryland. The population in that county is overwhelmingly black. To move to this black suburb represented a step up for blacks in Baltimore.

In the militant writing of the 1960s, on sale in his father’s bookstore and what Coates read in the library he loved at Howard, the aim was to get black and to stay black, to be on your guard against the corruption of assimilation. Rejection of the American dream—middle-class life—was implicit. As a cultural inheritance, authentic blackness became a form of ownership and intellectual capital for Coates’s hip-hop generation. You could get paid and still keep it real. Malcolm X was their hero. They didn’t believe in nonviolence. Telling it like it is, Malcolm X style, was the way to stay sane. Social hope was for clowns. You must not fall for it. Protect yourself. This is more than skepticism. To be resigned means you are not in danger of being anyone’s fool.

Coates writes in an intellectual landscape without the communism or Pan-Africanism that once figured in debate as alternatives to what white America seemed to offer. Hip-hop nationalism—of Coates’s time, say, KRS-One, Ice Cube, or the Wu-Tang Clan—has none of the provincialism of 1960s black nationalism. Coates says that he understands both Frederick Douglass, who advised blacks to remain in the US, and Martin Delany, who led a group of blacks to Liberia. What it means to be black still changes from place to place. “For a young man like me, the invention of the Internet was the invention of space travel.” Coates’s wife fell in love with Paris and the French language and then so did he, he says, and without thinking of Wright or Baldwin. Or Sartre or Camus, he adds. For Coates, writing is his alternative country.

Coates is in a very recognizable tradition, but that tradition is not static. Wright warned the white men of the West not to be too proud of their easy conquest of Africa and Asia. Baldwin invoked retribution of biblical magnitude if America did not end its racial nightmare. For Coates, it’s too late, given the larger picture. He speculates that now that the American Dreamers are plundering “not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself,” “something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas.”

He takes away America’s uniqueness. Human history is full of people who oppressed other people. To be white now has no meaning divorced from “the machinery of criminal power.” Is it a problem that Coates comes across as entirely reasonable in his refusal in this book to expect anything anymore, socially or politically? Harold Cruse’s anger against the betrayal of black nationalism in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) led him to tell off both the black activist and the white Communist in the strongest language possible. Coates is nearly as fed up as Cruse, but his disillusionment is a provocation: it’s all your fault, Whitey.

This is a rhetorical strategy of the tradition but to address an audience beyond black people is to be still attempting to communicate and enlighten. No author of a book on this subject can be filled with as much hopelessness as the black writer who no longer sees the point in anyone offering a polemic against racist America.

Du Bois never knew his father. He lived from the year the freedmen were enfranchised to the day before the March on Washington, and died a Communist in African exile. Hughes hated his father, an engineer who lived in Mexico in order to get away from Jim Crow. Wright’s sharecropper father abandoned the family. Ellison was two years old when his father died. Baldwin pitied the preacher who was really his stepfather. Baraka’s father was a postal supervisor, middle-class and in New Jersey.

Baraka gave a eulogy for Baldwin after his death, in part because he had become unpopular with whites late in his career. Baldwin turned out to have had Wright’s career, that of the engaged black writer. But he admired Ellison, who chose his art over being a spokesman, and never finished his second novel. Baldwin’s biographer, James Campbell, remembered that after he ran into Ellison at the Newport Jazz Festival, Baldwin said, “Ralph Ellison is so angry he can’t live.”

The post The Anger of Ta-Nehisi Coates appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The house Negro, according to Malcolm X, looked out for his master’s interest and put the field Negro back in his place on the plantation when he got out of line. The house Negro lived better than the field Negro, Malcolm X explained. He ate the same food as the master, dressed and spoke just as well. The house Negro loved the master more than the master loved himself, while the field Negro prayed for a strong wind to come along should the master’s house catch fire. Malcolm X said that he was a field Negro and for him the black establishment, the black upper class, became synonymous with the house Negro. “You’re nothing but an ex-slave. You don’t like to be told that. But what else are you? You are ex-slaves. You didn’t come here on the ‘Mayflower.’ You came here on a slave ship.”

The black elite provoked some scorn in the civil rights era of revolution in mass black consciousness. In The Negro Family in the United States (1939), E. Franklin Frazier had described how migration and the urbanization of black America changed the criteria by which a black upper class defined itself. Bloodline gave way to position. In his grand remonstrance, Black Bourgeoisie (1957), Frazier castigated the black upper class for having deteriorated into a sad imitation of conspicuously consuming white America. Others criticized black institutions for being conformist. For figures like Malcolm X, the history of black resistance exposed the futility of conventional avenues of struggle, as if illustrating Foucault’s point about the moral training of populations and the reform of manners as a means of reducing threat to property. Whether it was seen as politically impotent or socially up its own ass, the black elite was an irrelevance at a time when the forces of liberation were out to reshape the world; and when the vernacular was being elevated as the true source of black culture.

The idea of an Old Settler’s temperament in a black person seemed absurd. In his 1965 autobiography, Long Old Road, the distinguished sociologist Horace R. Cayton wrote about leaving Seattle in response to increased racism and running away to sea, where he befriended a veteran black sailor named Longreen who was unfamiliar with his past:

Of course I didn’t mention to Longreen anything about my grandfather being a senator or that we had once had a horse and carriage and a Japanese servant. He wouldn’t have believed me if I had, and I’d learned by then that with the general run of Negroes it was better not to refer to such an elegant background.

Just as white people in New York descended from Dutch colonists thought of themselves as Old Settlers, so, too, did black people already living in northern cities before the mass migration of mostly black agricultural workers from the South during World War I, especially upper-class blacks who were somewhat tolerated because they were few. Cayton’s father’s newspaper only became a black publication after the war, when so many blacks moved to Seattle that he lost his white advertisers. He had to remind his son that although one of Cayton’s grandfathers had been the first black US senator, the other had been a slave, as had he, his father.

In Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), the landmark work on Chicago that Cayton wrote with St. Clair Drake, the black upper class was, significantly, not a leisure class but a largely professional one that supplied goods and services to the Negro community. In the cold war days immediately after World War II, race leadership still came from the upper class. Its members fought segregation in every aspect and resented being told that they were trying to be white or to mix socially with whites. Because of segregation, blacks of all classes lived in close proximity. It was not poverty that upper-class blacks minded, Drake and Cayton said, so much as lack of decorum. Most black people in Chicago at the time of their study were employed as laborers.

Cayton was also clear that writing his autobiography was an attempt at self-reclamation. In the late 1930s and into the 1940s he had been a part of a vigorous scene of black intellectuals in Chicago, described in Lawrence P. Jackson’s important The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 (2011). Yet after World War II, its promises of freedom unanswered, he became increasingly bitter in his lectures, and as a community-center director he worried that he was little more than a stooge for the white man. One day he woke up in his office with a pistol in his hand. His autobiography ends not long after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, with him fighting depression and alcoholism, trying to start over, heading back out West. Horace Cayton would die in 1970 in Paris, where he was doing research for a biography of his friend Richard Wright. The black autobiographical tradition does not have many losers.

Margo Jefferson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1995, has nothing to prove and everything to say in Negroland, her brave, elegantly written memoir of growing up black and different. Born into the self-contained world of upper-class black Chicago that Drake and Cayton studied, Jefferson and her older sister spent their formative years, the 1950s and 1960s, in the bourgeois enclave of Hyde Park, daughters of the head of pediatrics at Provident Hospital, the oldest black hospital in the country, and a glamorous mother whose photograph could appear in the black press. Jefferson attended the famously progressive University of Chicago Laboratory School and High School. “Negroland is my name for a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty,” she says.

Class in black America has “a fraught history with many roots,” its distinctions going back to whether blacks were free or slave; northerner or southerner; property owner or unskilled worker; literate or not; light-skinned or not. Jefferson herself is descended in part from the Negro elite that was defined early on by how much it had to do with white people, its relation to white people, its nearness to them, by occupation, such as caterer or barber, or blood, even a former slave master’s. But after characterizing them this way, she writes, “I’ve fallen into a mocking tone that feels prematurely disloyal. There were antebellum founders of Negroland who triumphed through resolve and principled intelligence.” The severity of the black condition explains why blacks who could do so accepted the protection that identification with powerful whites offered. But she also recognizes that “Negro exceptionalism had its ugly side: pioneers who advanced through resolve, intelligence, and exploiting their own.” For example, we know now that one of the first legal slaveholders in seventeenth-century Virginia was an African man.

Jefferson unearths works such as Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society, published in 1841 in Philadelphia by Joseph Willson, a dentist and printer, the son of a Georgia slaveholder and an enslaved woman whom he freed before she bore his five children. In 1858, Cyprian Clamorgan, a barber descended from a prominent white St. Louis family, published The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. Jefferson notes the difference in style between Willson’s pride in his family’s quiet success and Clamorgan’s bragging about his white ancestors and large income. She takes her early examples of the black elite seriously and gives them their due, understanding their flaws and limitations, like family.

Jefferson has a deep sympathy for intellectual black women in the nineteenth century—poet and diarist Charlotte Forten; teacher and essayist Anna Julia Cooper, who received her doctorate from the Sorbonne when she was sixty-five years old; Ida B. Wells, the anti-lynching crusading journalist; and Charlotte Hawkins Brown, founder of a finishing school in North Carolina for black girls. Jefferson writes that W.E.B. Du Bois, who was born in 1868 and published his first book, The Philadelphia Negro, in 1899, “shares Cooper’s radical romanticism” as well as “Wells’s outrage,” but that “he is intent on cutting a much wider swath, sometimes at their expense.” On recordings, his voice resembles FDR’s.

Perhaps because of the influence of northern abolitionists or the New England schoolteachers who went south to teach the freedmen during Reconstruction, the image of the stern, stringent Bostonian replaced the doomed, noble southern aristocrat as the class ideal for black people largely trained at anxious black-church colleges. But for black America social status came to depend mostly on what an individual had achieved, precisely because individual achievement was not separate from the advancement of the black race as a whole. What Du Bois described in his 1903 essay “The Talented Tenth” was not an abstraction. In his vision, the few would lead the many. It was not where you were from that mattered but rather where you were headed.

What was forgotten in the protests of the 1960s—a period when black people began to enter the middle classes in meaningful numbers—was that for more than a century the sheer existence of a black upper class had represented a challenge to the racial status quo. The people in Jefferson’s world benefited from the civil rights movement as much as any black people did. But the social mobility of black people was not, for her, a testament to the openness of American society. Jefferson learned early that her family was where it was in spite of American society. On one road trip in 1956, her family traveled happily to Quebec and then New York, but a hotel in Atlantic City wouldn’t put them in the suite they’d reserved. They left the next day:

Such treatment encouraged privileged Negroes to see our privilege as more than justified: It was hard-won and politically righteous, a boon to the race, a source of compensatory pride, an example of what might be achieved.

They were not a normal family, not like the ones Jefferson saw on television or at the movies. Her parents had to do careful research before holidays in order to make sure things would be okay for them when they got to where they were going, and even then something could still happen. In the 1950s,

liberal whites who saw that we too had manners, money, and education lamented our caste disadvantage. Less liberal or non-liberal whites preferred not to see us in the private schools and public spaces of their choice. They had ready a bevy of slights: from skeptics the surprised glance and spare greeting; from waverers the pleasantry, eyes averted; from disdainers the direct cut. Caucasians with materially less than us were given license by Caucasians with more than them to subvert and attack our privilege.

Her mother told her a lot of white people did not like to address a Negro as “Doctor.” It would seem little compared to, say, the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 for the crime of supposedly having whistled at a white woman, but mob violence and casual disrespect had roots in the same license to attack black people. Trouble knows your name, James Baldwin said.

Yet Jefferson is describing a world of black confidence, not one of uncomprehending imitation or secret self-loathing. It matters that she grew up in Chicago when she did. In her youth, Chicago was the undisputed second city, a manufacturing powerhouse divided into ethnic zones. Violence often attended the spread of the black population. Black Chicago was large and had capital, substantial enterprises, and strong churches. Black institutions still had prestige in the black community. Negroland was real:

In Negroland we thought of ourselves as the Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasians. Like the Third Eye, the Third Race possessed a wisdom, intuition, and enlightened knowledge the other two races lacked. Its members had education, ambition, sophistication, and standardized verbal dexterity.

Home life took place in and around Fortress Negro. “In the privacy of an all-Negro world, Negro privilege could lounge and saunter too, show off its accoutrements and lay down the law.” Jefferson writes about the group activities of childhood and the extracurricular schedule of her adolescence as rituals of cohesion, tribal defense against the social disorganization of black life in general. However, though she may have been born into Negroland, education was a mixed-race experience. She had access to white high schools and exclusive music camps. In her memoir, Jefferson takes up distinctions between classes and races, but also between genders, and it is as a girl’s coming-of-age story, a black girl’s story, in a time of social change, that Negroland explores yet more unexpected territory.

Women were conveyors of racial inheritance. Jefferson’s mother was present to correct her always. In one scene, she recounts how amused she and her sister were by what they considered the ignorant country language of the speaker, an old black woman, in the Langston Hughes poem “Mother to Son”: “Well, son, I’ll tell you:/Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.” Their mother listened, then explained who Hughes was, and then read the poem for them, calling on “all the resources of Negro life and history,…turning dialect to vernacular.” Her mother, who grew up on Negro History Week, let them know that Hughes had even taught briefly at the Lab School.

The owners of The Chicago Defender, a leading black newspaper, were their friends, and they were aware that Ida B. Wells had worked in Chicago. Jefferson’s mother told them about the anthropologist Katherine Dunham and that major work of sociology, Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton. Her family read The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP. They were not white people; they knew that Rosa Parks was not a Negro woman suddenly too tired to change seats, but rather the secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter of the NAACP that had been meticulously preparing its challenge to segregation on municipal buses.

Jefferson grew up knowing that the women responsible for her believed in “feminine command.” “It’s never too hot for fur,” her grandmother said on a visit back to the South. As young black women, she and her sister were learning how to comport themselves as ladies. It was a kind of vindication. That nice-girl problem of how to attract boys without getting a reputation was further complicated by the history of black women forever being depicted in American culture as oversexed and animalistic, which justified the exploitation of their bodies. Respectability was therefore a grave matter. Nice black girls learned that women of achievement renounced vanity and lightheartedness, exhibited unceasing fortitude, and put the needs of others first. “I enjoy being irreproachable,” Jefferson writes.

The cost of self-control was easily underestimated. “Oh, the vehement inner lives of girls snatching at heroines and role models!” Meanwhile, as a nice black girl Jefferson was judged by standards of beauty that were of social history’s making: grade of hair, skin color, flat or straight nose, size of ass, shape of foot. Whiteness. “The fashion and beauty complex has so many ways to enchant and maim.” She takes pride in and has sympathy for Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge, but conceives a teenager’s passion for Audrey Hepburn. “No! You cannot ever be white like these idols of feminine perfection. Let that final impossibility reproach and taunt you.”

Jefferson’s story becomes more and more about gender difference and where it intersects with race after she graduates from Brandeis College in 1968. Eventually, she is conspicuous as the only black woman columnist at Newsweek magazine. “The white world had made the rules that excluded us; now, when it saw fit, it altered those rules to include a few of us.” Her childhood is about Negroland at its segregated zenith, but childhood is a woman’s story waiting to happen, one influenced by—if not directly about—the feminist movement of the 1970s.

Jefferson is touchingly honest about her inhibited response to the black feminist sensation of that era, Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuff (1976). Shange, born Paulette Williams, was a nice black girl and Barnard College graduate who’d gone off the rails. However, Jefferson summons to the rescue the figure of Florynce Kennedy, the great activist lawyer in a cowboy hat, a beloved presence in radical circles in 1970s New York. Many black women back then argued that feminism was a white woman’s thing and that if you scratched a white feminist you would find simply a white person. It was more important to address social needs along racial lines. Kennedy answered that black women had been copying bad ideas from white women for so long it was crazy when they came along with a good one not to want to copy that:

[The black woman’s] history of struggle, degradation, triumph; her exclusion from the rewards of bourgeois femininity; her duty to strengthen the Negro family. Not a history one wanted to haul through one’s social life. Not a history one wanted to lumber into the sexual revolution with. Not a history one wanted to have sternly codified by white sociologists and Black Power revolutionaries who found the faults of The Black Woman much the same as those of The Negro Woman. She was bellicose, she was self-centered; she was sexually prudish when not castrating.

When Jefferson was growing up, race mattered, but gender didn’t. The fight for women’s rights was greeted with “mockery, contempt, or repressive tolerance.” Girls of her class were encouraged to take certain privileges for granted, but these privileges were designed to make them eligible for good marriages, i.e., yet more social status, and they were taught to “cherish that generic female future.” Black women historically had entered the white-collar workforce faster than black men, because of the relatively low status of clerical and secretarial work, and most of the black professional women Jefferson knew of as a girl were also wives and mothers. Sometimes she was warned to have something to fall back on, an acknowledgment that the black man’s economic life could be insecure. At the same time, a woman alone was an object of pity or whispers.

The question Jefferson asks of her experience was: How could she adapt her willful self to so much history and myth? The answer is that she didn’t. There is, in her account, no accommodation or acceptance of middle-class standards and life. This isn’t a memoir that tells us how a black person with opportunities got over her guilt and relaxed into the life of getting ahead that her family had sacrificed for her to have. She made instead a life as a journalist and critic and then another life in the high bohemia of New York intellectuals and artists, away from the conventions of her male-dominated professional world. “All that circumnavigating of race, class, and gender made for comedy too.”

Jefferson’s answer is also in her sophisticated tone and style, in the free and open manner in which Negroland is structured. Her book includes many brief anecdotes, digressions, and “dialogues” between unnamed characters. Paragraph headings announce “The Jefferson Girls,” “The Jefferson Girls and Ballet,” “The Jefferson Girls and Beauty,” “Another Negro History Week Lesson,” or “Boys.” What marks Negroland off from other works on such a potentially cringe-inducing subject is Jefferson’s literary sensibility: “I’m a chronicler of Negroland, a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor.” Some of her most intense passages have to do with her instinctive escape into Lewis Carroll or her immersion in the personalities of the sisters in Little Women and what their destinies portended for her.

Identity is fluid. “There’s a space in our consciousness where all this racialized material collects, never static, mutating or at least recombining.” Jefferson struggles with her own reticence. “I think it’s too easy to recount unhappy memories when you write about race,” she observes. “You revere your grief.” Though she knows she has had more choices, and therefore more freedom, than most, there remained lines she dared not cross. Black girls in Negroland “had been denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity.”

Charlotte Forten, granddaughter of a rich, free-born black Philadelphia sail maker, kept a diary and went south in 1862 to teach freed slaves in South Carolina. Her diary stops when she falls in love with moonlit rides on horseback alongside a married white doctor from Boston. When her diary resumes many years later, she is the prim wife of a black minister from a prominent family much like her own. Angela Davis, who comes from a middle-class household in Birmingham, Alabama, and graduated from Brandeis four years earlier than Jefferson, refuses in her Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974) to write about herself as exceptional in any way—a principle dictated by her politics, her allegiance to her constituencies, rejecting the romanticism of her own image, a keeping faith with the four girls killed in the church bombing in Birmingham in 1963. “Internalize The Race. Internalize both races,” Jefferson says at one point. “Then internalize the contradictions. Teach your psyche to adapt its solo life to a group obbligato. Or let it abandon any impulse toward independence and hurtle toward a feverishly perfect representation of your people.”

The constant for black men has been the threat of violence; the constant for black women has been that they were still women. Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen got kicked out of Fisk University for wearing bright colors. A’Lelia Bundles’s On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker (2001), a biography of her great-grandmother, the founder of a black cosmetics industry; Jill Nelson’s Finding Martha’s Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island (2005); Gail Lumet Buckley’s The Hornes: An American Family (1986) and her recent The Black Calhouns: From Civil War to Civil Rights with One African American Family—these works are personal as well as acts of retrieval and conservation. The authors can see themselves in the continuum of the histories they are recording. But Jefferson is coming at the subject of the black elite from an odd angle, examining it as a legacy of proscription and privilege, grief and achievement, love for, and shame because of, other black people; love for and terror of so-called white culture. “My enemies took too much. My loved ones asked too much.”

The closest thing to her homage to ambiguity—from another nice black girl—is avant-garde playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s experimental autobiography, People Who Led to My Plays (1987). The new Americans must be able to think in contradictions, Henry Adams said in his Education. “Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can’t imagine you,” Jefferson says. “That’s your first education.”

The post Elite Black & Quite Different appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Google wasn’t around when Oreo was first published in 1974. You are hit with Greek mythology and Yiddish right away and just the look of the pages of Fran Ross’s novel about an Afro-Jewish girl’s quest to find her white father can discourage or intimidate. Oreo, by an African-American writer who died in 1985, promises a degree of difficulty; the chapter titles, paragraph titles (“Helen and Oreo shmooz”), different font sizes, a graph showing shades of blackness, letters, an elaborate five-page menu of a daughter’s homecoming meal, footnotes, and mathematical equations say this is no naturalistic tale of two ghettoes. The protagonist is called “Oreo” not because of the cookie—i.e., because she is mixed-race or reluctantly black, as in black on the outside but white on the inside. Her black grandmother had been trying to give Oreo the nickname “Oriole,” but couldn’t make herself understood to the family.

In addition to Greek myth and Yiddish, Ross makes use of black slang, popular culture of the time, puns, raunch, her own made-up words—but this is not vernacular, not jive. Ross’s voice is literary, and thrilled with itself, joking about Villon or Bellow, totally into what it takes to get up to outrageous parody. Nothing about the narrative is restful; you have to stay on the alert. Oreo is quick, obscure, sly, and every line is working hard, doing its bit. Ross makes Oreo relentless in her shtick. “Oreo was soon engrossed in ‘Burp: The Course of Smiling Among Groups of Israeli Infants in the First Eighteen Months of Life,’ the cover story in Pitfalls of Gynecology.”

In fractured, short chapters, Oreo decides arbitrarily that she has fulfilled a given task and therefore deserves another cryptic clue from her father. Ross gives us not a send-up of Theseus’s journey of labors, but her appropriation of his battles as her structure, her frame for her provocative urban picaresque.

This is going to be fun. I am having a whale of a time, the omniscient voice seems to say on every page, and you should, too, and so Oreo isn’t a novel that makes assumptions about a reader’s type of education, but one that makes it clear pretty soon that no reader is expected to get it all, or even can. As a puzzle, Oreo is rigged from the start. All is playfulness, but a serious act of insinuation or trespass is going on—a woman, either the author or the protagonist, is carrying on, giving attitude like a man and getting away with it in a literary world made by Plutarch, Cervantes, Sterne, Joyce, Vonnegut, Pynchon.

A word about weather

There is no weather per se in this book. Passing reference is made to weather in a few instances. Assume whatever season you like throughout. Summer makes the most sense in a book of this length. That way, pages do not have to be used up describing people taking off and putting on overcoats.

Oreo’s Jewish grandmother died of a “racist/my-son-the-bum coronary” when he told her that he was marrying a black girl and dropping out of school. Oreo’s black grandfather had a stroke and the text provides an illustration of the half-swastika he resembled, rigid in his straight-back chair. He’d hated Jews, but made money in the mail-order business selling to a Jewish clientele a range of Jewish merchandise, including dreidels for Hanukkah, wine goblets for Passover, and the Jewish History Coloring Book. Oreo’s parents fight on Mondays and Thursdays, and when they break up, her father tells her mother to send their daughter to him when she is old enough and he will reveal to her the secret of her birth:

From the Jewish side of the family Christine [Oreo] inherited kinky hair and dark, thin skin (she was about a 7 on the color scale and touchy). From the black side of the family she inherited sharp features, rhythm, and thin skin (she was touchy). Two years after this book ends, she would be the ideal beauty of legend and folklore—name the nationality, specify the ethnic group. Whatever your legends and folklore bring to mind for beauty of face and form, she would be it, honey.

The narrative progresses through digressions—about Oreo’s black grandmother, one of the great cooks of her time, and food; about her black grandfather’s impaired mental processes after his stroke. Oreo’s mother sends letters from her life on the road. She went to work as a singer or pianist after Oreo’s father left. Her head is full of childhood memories. We meet Oreo’s “tutors” as she grows up in Philadelphia. For instance, the loquacious milkman has an “udderful of theories” about life:

Now, kinky hair. Kinky hair—like that beautiful fuzzy cloud you have—is not really kinky. It doesn’t zig and zag. Kinky hair is actually coily. That’s right—coily. Each little hair is practically by way of being a perfect circle. Now, these millions of coils on your head are all jumbled up, coiling around each other. That’s why it hurts you to comb your hair. You’re pulling in one direction, the coils may be pulling in sixteen other directions. But—and this is the main thing—while the coils are doing that, they are also forming air pockets. Now, air pockets do several things. One, they keep your head warm in the winter. Two, they keep your head cool in the summer. And, three, they protect you from concussions by absorbing the shock of blows to the head. Therefore, kinky hair is certainly more useful than straight hair. It is obviously advanced hair. I mean, the evolutionary wheel had to take a couple of wrong turns before it came up with kinky hair.

When the time comes, Oreo goes overland not to Athens, but to New York. The dangers, the beasts, are at the station, on the subway concourse, or on the train. She follows clues that take her from the East Side of Second Avenue to Riverside Drive. Up in Harlem, seeing a pimp leading five white prostitutes and five black ones,

It was as though the pimp were swimming down the street, a swan breasting the current for his cygnets. The cob would take two stroking steps, glide to a stop, flutter his arms ostentatiously to his hips, turn to see that he was still followed at a respectful distance, and continue downstream. His clothes seem to grow out of him, hugging his lithe, sigmoid torso more snugly than a suit of lights a torero’s sinuosity. He was fledged in a suit of pearlescent pink velvet, a soft dawn-gray shirt, a blushing-rose string tie. His long-billed velvet cap raked this way and that as he skewed about to check on the progress of his brood. The rake’s progress, Oreo thought, and laughed to herself. Occasionally he paused to buff his nails, perking his chest with anseriform hauteur. When he stopped, the women stopped; when he moved on, they followed. Oreo decided to name him after an adulterer and, as a student of British history, dubbed him Parnell.

Oreo meets at last with her father on the Upper West Side and the remainder of the novel is a long, deliberate anticlimax of daughterly disappointment and revenge. “Of course, the clues had been meant only to make Oreo think of the legend of Theseus. They had nothing to do with any of her actual adventures.” Yet Ross appends “A Key for Speed Readers, Nonclassicists, Etc.” in which she gives an outline of Theseus’s story, notably his contest with the Minotaur, and a list of which figures in it correspond to which characters in Oreo’s story. “Aegeus—Samuel Schwartz.”

Her story begins with absolute primogeniture: her father leaves the first set of clues under a rock for her, not her younger brother. Then, Ross will stop at nothing:

Oreo’s menarche had been at age eight. She had been minding her own business, experimenting to see whether her pet turtle would try to mate with an army helmet, half a walnut shell, or a swatch of linoleum (the “bottom-shell hypothesis”), when she felt a slight contraction in her lower abdomen. She was vague about the area—it happened so fast—but it was somewhere below the pupik and above the mons veneris. She went to the bathroom to check on a stickiness she felt—and saw the blood. “Oi gevalt,” she said, “what the fuck is this shit?”

Along the way, from Philadelphia to New York, the baddies whom Oreo subdues are men caught in the act of oppressing someone. Oreo relishes physical retaliation. She punishes the men, beats them with her cane, subjects them to mighty blows. She is a martial arts specialist. “She sure got womb, that little mother,” her uncle said of her when she was still a child. “She is a ball buster and a half.” Ross was a committed feminist. The only thing the novel doesn’t target is Oreo herself. In a touching afterword, Harryette Mullen points out the ways in which Ross’s work is different from most fiction by women, black or white, in the 1970s.

This edition of Oreo also includes a gripping foreword by Danzy Senna, remembering when Oreo was reprinted in 1997 and its embrace by black bohemia in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, for all the reasons it failed to gain much notice when first published twenty-three years earlier. Throughout the novel, Ross’s narrator talks in various ways about the story being composed:

She read the first and last words of the treatise, titled Lying Fallow, or What You Should Know About Federal Subsidies, and started and ended her essay with similar words. In Lying Fallow, the first word was snow and the last word was potatoes. In her book-length essay (Secretaries of Agriculture I Have Known, or God: The First Economic Agronomist), Oreo experimented with monsoon and broccoli as her first and last words, but decided they were too exotic, and, what is more, monsoon had too many syllables. Already she had strayed from the obvious pattern Fallow’s author had established with his forceful yet sensitive first and last words. After an evening with Roget, Oreo decided that her first word would be rain and her last word rice. She was more than willing to sacrifice syllables (her two to Fallow’s four) for alliteration. She quickly filled in the middle section of her essay, using the same technique. What she sacrificed in cogency, she gained in mechanicality (her serendipitous assembly-line gobbledygook against Fallow’s numbing agroeconomic clarity). Thus a typical sentence in Fallow: “Wheat farm B showed a declining profit-loss ratio during the harvest season,” became in Oreo’s manuscript: “Oat ranch wasp played the drooping excess-death proportion while a crop pepper.”

Or, in an uptown recording studio:

Oreo could hear the strange permutation of words speeded up and slowed down, rushed backward and whisked forward, the barbaric yawp of words cut off in mid-syllable (the choked consonants, the disavowed vowels), burdened with excessive volume, affecting elusive portent. Words were all over the floor. Words and time. What word was that there in the corner, curled up like a fetus? And this umbilicus of sound, what caesarean intervention had ripped it untimely from its mother root? Sound boomed off the walls, rocketing around the hallways as it charged out of an open door marked CONTROL ROOM B.

Is that not Ross in that room, manning the controls?

Fran Ross was born in Philadelphia in 1935, where she graduated from Temple University. She was not of mixed-race parentage. Her family came from North Carolina. There were Russian Jewish immigrants in her Philadelphia neighborhood when she was growing up. Ross moved to New York in 1960 and found a position in publishing. Mullen and Senna tell us that in 1977, thanks to Oreo, she went to Los Angeles to work as a comedy writer on The Richard Pryor Show. However, Pryor bristled at network censorship and the show ended after only four episodes. Ross could not find other work in television comedy. She returned to New York, where she died of cancer at the age of fifty.

Her only novel makes fun of the oi-veying Jewish aunt as well as the mush-mouthed black grandmother. Perhaps this equality of mockery helped to make Oreo a book hard to classify back in the 1970s. Moreover, black–Jewish relations had fallen apart when Oreo was published—partly because of tensions between Jewish members of the teachers’ union and the black community of Ocean Hill–Brownsville in Brooklyn during the teachers’ strike of 1968, and especially because of what had happened to the Palestinians in the camps in 1973. The cultural climate was one of not wanting to deal with the question of the black–Jewish coalition anymore.

Because Ross is taking off from myth, Oreo is a tall tale, but at a time when black writers such as Toni Morrison, Albert Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara were seeking to honor black America’s origins as an oral culture, Ross didn’t bother to disguise the elitism of the learning on display in her comic novel, which sometimes parodies the folk voice.

Norman Mailer may have urged white hipsters to model themselves after badass black men in his essay “The White Negro” (1957), but not long afterward, in Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), Mailer said he was tired of Negroes and their rights, sick of the tyranny of soul music, bored with Negroes late to their appointments, and depressed by black inhumanity to black in Biafra. And the young of the Black Arts Movement were weary of black writers behaving, forgiving, explaining. The Problem Novel about race had been strengthened in the era of integration. It took a while for the militancy that had overtaken much work by black poets and black playwrights in the 1960s to find expression in fiction, because it was difficult for black writers to free themselves from the narrative traditions of double-consciousness. In fiction, the movement took the form of escapes from realism, from the pieties of the black condition.

Henry Van Dyke, whose comedies call up Ronald Firbank, published Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes in 1965. It recounts the tempestuous love between a white spinster and her paid black companion as observed by a merry black teenager. William Demby, a black novelist, is the narrator of William Demby’s The Catacombs (1965), about an interracial affair in Rome. Charles Wright’s The Wig (1966) is a weird spoof on the picaresque and the coming-of-age-novel and a put-down of Great Society optimism about black advancement.

William Melvin Kelley’s dem (1967) appears to be a “raceless” novel, until it is slowly revealed that the white advertising executive protagonist has been cuckolded by a black man. The linguistic daring of Kelley’s Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1970), with its puns and neologisms, is part of the decomposition of the novel that was going on in America in general. Black writers were as free to experiment with the form as anyone. The author spontaneously combusts at the end of Clarence Major’s Emergency Exit (1979). Satire and caustic humor seemed to go with the times. We were, after all, at war, at home and abroad. There was no shortage of the Problem Novel and realism, but black culture relaxed its vigilance and made room for John Oliver Killens’s broad slapstick about self-image problems in The Cotillion (1970) or Bill Gunn’s hurt-filled satires about blacks in Hollywood, Black Picture Show (1978) and Rhinestone Sharecropping (1981).

When we think of irreverence in black literature, we turn immediately to Ishmael Reed and his allegorical burlesques and pastiches of the fantastic. Mumbo Jumbo (1972) has its scholarly apparatus, but in this, his best-known work, Reed is vehemently against Western culture and offers “Neo-Hoodooism” as an alternative history and a philosophy of black cultural nationalism. Oreo was published the same year as The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Ishmael Reed’s novel that kicked off his public quarrel with feminism. Charles Johnson’s first novel came out in the same year. His Faith and the Good Thing is a harsh fable about modern black women.

Johnson’s Oxherding Tale (1982) is a stunning reinvention of the slave narrative but what comes through strongest in the writing is Johnson’s saturation in Eastern philosophy, like Schopenhauer or Seymour Glass. Reed and Johnson are the company Fran Ross keeps—or the male preserve she invaded. In Mumbo Jumbo Reed makes his “Curator of the Center of Art Detention” complain:

Son, these niggers writing. Profaning our sacred words. Taking them from us and beating them on the anvil of BoogieWoogie, putting their black hands on them so that they shine like burnished amulets. Taking our words, son, these filthy niggers and using them like…god-given pussy.

Ross makes sure that Oreo is an inveterate crotch-watcher, expertly measuring up men, putting them in different categories, laughing at her own use of shlong, dong, pecker, dick, etc.

Image control, Charles Johnson said, had been the aim of black literature since the beginning of black literary production. Therefore that was also its problem—the ancient faith that language and literary art would clarify the black experience. Johnson went on to say that the black experience in literature exists only in literature and therefore varies from writer to writer. Oreo has the atmosphere of a special time and place. The dialogue is like the conversation of a mad bibliophile in a secondhand bookstore on the Upper West Side in the 1970s, a place of sanctuary for the blacks and Jews who still shared a cosmopolitan New York culture.

The post Blacks & Jews Entangled appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Black people in America have been under surveillance ever since the seventeenth century, when enslaved Africans were forced to labor in the tobacco and rice fields of the South. Colonial law quickly made a distinction between indentured servants and slaves, and in so doing invented whiteness in America. It may have been possible for a free African or mixed-race person to own slaves, but it was not possible for a European to be taken into slavery. The distinction helped to keep blacks and poor whites from seeking common cause.

The slave patrols that originated in the seventeenth century would be largely made up of poor whites—paterollers, the members of the patrols were called. To stop, harass, whip, injure, or kill black people was both their duty and their reward, their understanding of themselves as white people, something they shared with their social betters. Of course their real purpose was to monitor and suppress the capacity for slave rebellion. While the militias dealt with the Indians, the paterollers rode black people.

Police forces in the North may have been modeled on Sir Robert Peel’s plans for London, but as jobs connected to city politics, the policemen themselves, from Boston to Chicago, were Irish, people who had been despised when they first came to America. That they lived next to or with black people told them how close to the bottom of American society they were. In every city the Irish did battle with their nearest neighbors, black people, in order to become American and to keep blacks in their place, below them. North and South, the police were relied upon to maintain the status quo, to control a dark labor force that was feared.

White southerners during Reconstruction resented black police officers and their power to arrest a white man. Redemption, the triumph of white supremacy, pretty much eliminated black police officers. In W. Marvin Dulaney’s Black Police in America (1996), the story of blacks on American police forces until the 1970s is one of tokenism and distrust by white colleagues.

Meanwhile, police forces and their relation to black people in general is a long tale about the enforcement of whiteness and blackness. When in 1967 Carl Stokes, the newly elected black mayor of Cleveland who had won due to a coalition of black and white voters, assigned black police officers only, no white ones, to black districts of the city that had experienced riots, white police officials were indignant. What had the mayor taken from them?

In the 1960s, the nation was told every summer to brace itself for a season of urban unrest, much of it, as remembered in essays in Police Brutality (2000), edited by Jill Nelson, ignited by confrontations between police officers and black people. There are the names of past victims of police killings that we have forgotten and there are names chilling to invoke: Eleanor Bumpurs, shot by police fifty-four times in New York City in 1984 because she was large and held a butter knife. But starting with Twitter keeping vigil over the body of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014, and last summer, and already this summer, there is no more denying or forgetting. Social media have removed the filters that used to protect white America from what it didn’t want to see, thereby protecting the police as well. Instead of calling 911, black America now pulls out its smartphones, in order to document the actions of the death squads that dialing 911 can summon.

The camera has made all the difference. A camera can mean that there is no ambiguity about what happened. Feidin Santana just happened to be where he was with his cell phone when Walter Scott was killed in North Charleston, South Carolina, on April 4, 2015. We see Scott on the police car dash cam video getting out of that black Mercedes with the supposedly broken brake light and running. Then we see, on Santana’s video, Michael Slager firing eight shots into Scott’s back. We don’t see Scott trying to grab Slager’s taser, as Slager alleged.

In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on July 5 of this year, two cell phones captured two white policemen pinning Alton Sterling on the ground by a parked car in front of a convenience store. Footage from one cell phone is interrupted as one of the policemen yells “Gun” and several shots are heard. The woman filming from a nearby car has dropped down in her seat and she can be heard screaming. But the other cell phone, used by the owner of the convenience store, doesn’t blink. It records an officer removing something from Sterling’s pocket after he is dead. One of the things that will have to be determined is where his gun was before he was shot.

Brendon Jenkins, or “Jinx,” a cool-voiced black anchorman for the online news service Complex News, reported that in possessing a weapon, Sterling was in violation of his probation, given his record—and he offered this information, Jinx added, in the spirit of a transparency that he hoped the Baton Rouge police department would also show. The store owner, whose CCTV footage had been confiscated by the police, said that Sterling armed himself because street sellers of CDs, as he was, had been robbed recently in the neighborhood. Jinx also said that the two white police officers, Blane Salamoni, with four years on the force, and Howie Lake, with three years on the force, both put on paid administrative leave, were supposed to have said that they felt justified in the shooting. The officers said that the body cameras they were wearing fell off or were knocked out of order during the struggle.

On July 6, Diamond “Lavish” Reynolds went on Facebook moments after her fiancé, Philando Castile, was shot four or five times in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, outside St. Paul, and, with her four-year-old daughter in the back seat ready to console her, she became like a broadcast station from the car:

He was trying to get his ID out of his pocket, and he let the officer know that he was, he had a firearm, and was reaching for his wallet and the officer just shot him in his arm…. Please, Jesus, don’t tell me that he’s gone. Please, officer, don’t tell me that you just did this to him….

Philando Castile would turn out to have been pulled over by police fifty-two times in the past fourteen years, so he knew how to respond to a police stop. He also had over $6,000 outstanding in fines—the pressures of municipal revenue generation.

The Castile family was demanding that the police vehicle dash cam footage be released, as well as the name of the police officer—Jeronimo Yanez—(“Chinese,” Reynolds called him) who has been on the St. Anthony, Minnesota, police force for about four years. (Why does CNN correspondent Chris Cuomo address in public members of the Castile family older than he is by their first names? Young white people don’t always consider how disrespectful rather than friendly that can seem to older black people in his audience.)

In Reynolds’s broadcast on her Facebook page, the panic and unpreparedness are evident in the shrieking of Officer Yanez that can be overheard. He is still pointing his gun in the driver’s window as Castile, a popular school cafeteria supervisor, lies dying. He blames his victim. Reynolds knew instinctively what authority demanded and she repeatedly addressed the white man who had just ruined her life as “sir.” “You shot four bullets into him, sir.” After Reynolds has been taken from the car in handcuffs, her phone on the ground, Yanez can be heard shouting “Fuck!” Many of the killings in the past three years seem to have at their core the fury of these police officers that they have been defied by black men, that they have been challenged, not been obeyed.

Most police officers don’t want anything to go wrong, a retired New York City detective, a black officer, a former marine, explained to me last year on the anniversary of Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri. The first thing that happens, he said, is that they get taken off the streets, put on leave or put behind desks, and can’t make any overtime. Moreover, your colleagues don’t want to work with you because you’ve become a problem. Most officers do not in their entire careers use their weapons in the line of duty. When they do, what happens is not a matter of the training that was often some years ago and even then only for a few weeks. It is a matter of the individual officer’s character, what he or she is like in an emergency.

Until recently, grand juries were reluctant to indict police officers for shootings and when they did, trial juries tended to return dutiful not-guilty verdicts. Some black activists had hoped that white policemen going to jail for killing unarmed black men would act as a deterrent. In 2014, Officer Jason Blackwelder was convicted of manslaughter in the Conroe, Texas, death of Russell Rios, nineteen. Blackwelder was dismissed from the police force, because a felon can’t serve, but he was not imprisoned. He received a sentence of five years’ probation. There was no video of the crime he was tried for, but the forensic evidence—Rios had been shot in the back of his head—contradicted the policeman’s story.

Black Baltimore rioted following the death on April 19, 2015, of Freddie Gray, from spinal injuries sustained while in custody in a police van. Three of the six officers charged were white; three were black. One was acquitted of assault, reckless endangerment, and misconduct; a mistrial was declared in the manslaughter trial of another officer. Four are awaiting trial. In the video of his violent arrest, Gray is screaming and the man filming yells at the police for “tasering him like that.”

Officer Lisa Mearkle’s camera on her taser recorded the shooting death in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, in 2015 of David Kassick, a white man, while he was down in the snow. Not every officer involved in police violence is male. She was acquitted.

In Chicago in 2014, the killing of Laquan McDonald, seventeen, captured on a squad car dash cam was so horrible that a court ordered the police to release the footage. The shooter is offscreen, but you can see puffs of smoke from some of the sixteen bullets striking McDonald and the street around him where he lies. After sixteen seconds, Officer Jason Van Dyke enters the frame and kicks away what is probably the knife that had been in McDonald’s hand. The case has been turned over to a special prosecutor. It is ironic that after so many years of hostility to the notion that we are under constant watch, not only do we accept cameras, we are in favor of the democratization of surveillance.

The police can be charged, yet the murder of black men, armed and unarmed, at police hands hasn’t stopped. Just as creepy people who want to mess with children try to get jobs that give them access to and authority over children, so, too, losers who want to throw their weight around and intimidate others with impunity are often drawn to a job like that of being a policeman. “The best way to deal with police misconduct is to prevent it by effective methods of personnel screening, training, and supervision,” the president’s Crime Commission Report recommended—in 1968.

Jurisdictions like Ferguson, Missouri, know who their trouble officers are. They accumulate histories of racial incident. They arrive as known quantities. It’s time to make it harder to become a police officer. The ones ill-suited for the job are burdens for the ones who are good at it. The videos of police killings also help explain those doubtful cases for which there are no accidental witnesses. The footage shows not only blood lust, state-sanctioned racism, or the culture of the lone gunman in many a police head, but also incompetence.

Nakia Jones, a mother and policewoman in Warrensville Heights, outside Cleveland, says in a moving Facebook post, “I wear blue,” telling other officers that if they are afraid of where they work, if they have a god complex, then they have no business trying to be the police in such neighborhoods. They need to take off the uniform:

If you’re white and you’re working in a black community and you’re racist, you need to be ashamed of yourself. You stood up there and took an oath. If this is not where you want to work at you need to take your behind somewhere else.

Officer Jones’s passion recalls Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964. Jones also asked black men to put down their guns, to stop killing one another, and mentor young black males.

The camera has accelerated the decriminalization of the black image in American culture. The black men about to lose their lives in these videos don’t seem like threats or members of a criminal class; and we have been looking at and listening to President Obama every day. The Willie Horton ad isn’t coming back and those who try to use the old racist slanders as political weapons only make themselves into caricatures. The racist is an unattractive figure in American culture, which is why people go to such lengths to achieve racist goals by stealth.

Then, too, just as black identity is found to contain layers, so the majority of young whites might be embarrassed by a racial identity that bestows privileges the protection of which has become harmful to the general welfare. They want a fluid identity as well, a new kind of being white. To intimidate and imprison an urban black male population is unacceptable to them as the task of our police forces. Before Black Lives Matter, there was Occupy Wall Street, which, in Zucotti Park in downtown Manhattan, had a significant black presence, because of union participation alongside the integrated camps of students. The great demonstrations against the Iraq War had had no effect, and many went home, discouraged, for years. But the Occupy movement reopened the street as the platform from which marginal issues could be launched into mainstream consciousness.

The Washington Post reported in June 2015 that 385 people had been killed by the police in the first five months of that year, mostly armed men, a number of them mentally ill. The Post further reported that two thirds of the black and Hispanic victims were unarmed. A website, Mapping Police Violence, displays the photographs, stories, and legal disposition of the 102 cases during that five-month period in which the murdered were unarmed black people. Another site, The Counted, maintained by The Guardian, allows you to catch up by calendar day on the 569 people killed by police so far in 2016, and who they were.

Moreover, some urgent books in recent years have had considerable influence—works on racial profiling, stop and frisk, discriminatory sentencing practices, the disproportionately high black prison population, the profitability of the prison industry, the hallucinatory disaster of the war on drugs, and the double standard when it comes to race and class and the law. A quarter of the world’s prisoners are held in the US. Reform of the criminal justice system is a mainstream issue.

Political rhetoric of a certain kind—the absurd notion that protests against the police will lead somehow to higher crime rates—is predictably primitive and maybe some of the backlash we are hearing comes from frustration, the cry of a dying order. On the other hand, recent Pew Center research suggests that a wide discrepancy between black and white respondents is still there when it comes to support of police. Work slowdowns, the displays of tribal solidarity at police funerals—the police can come off as bullies who really mind being criticized, except that they have lethal weapons, the right to use deadly force. Police killings ought to be examined as part of the larger social menace of having too many guns around and far too many people who like guns.

Police practice has led to the violation of the Fourth Amendment and First Amendment rights of black people, but for black people a Second Amendment literalism invites persecution. In 1966, the sight of black men with rifles on the steps of the California capitol incited the state police and the FBI, and the destruction of the Black Panthers was assured. The black men in Dallas who came to the Black Lives Matter march on July 7 in camouflage uniforms, with their long guns, were risking their lives and maybe the lives of those around them. You think you’re a symbol, but you’re a target. When the shooting started, they ran like everyone else, and sightings of various black men with guns at first led the police to think that there was more than one gunman and that they were being fired upon from a tall building, not from inside a garage.

Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Michael Krol, Michael Smith, and Lorne Ahrens were not the white police officers who killed Alton Sterling or Philando Castile; but the killer of these five white policemen, Micah Johnson, a black man, assumed that they could have been, they and the seven other officers he wounded at that Black Lives Matter march in Dallas on July 7. Or he decided that they had to pay for the deaths anyway. He is the disgraced ex-soldier with a grievance, the suicidal opportunist. It is distasteful to reduce deaths to the level of strategy, but Micah Johnson gave some right-wing opponents of Black Lives Matter the chance to pretend that parity exists between black men and white policemen as potential victims of racial violence.

The Dallas police chief, David O. Brown, a black man, the father of a son who killed a policeman and was killed in the ensuing shootout with police, explained at a press conference that Johnson had said he wanted to kill white officers. In fact some white officers protected black marchers from him.

Some young black people say they can understand being fed up enough to pick up a gun. In “16 Shots,” his response to the police killing of Laquan McDonald in Chicago, the rapper Vic Mensa warns:

Ain’t no fun when the rabbit got the gun
When I cock back police better run….

But we do not need agents of violent retribution.

The protests go on, without interruption. The response of Black Lives Matter to the Dallas killings was crucial and heartbreaking: “This is a tragedy—both for those who have been impacted by yesterday’s attack and for our democracy.” Dignity, not death.

The post Black Lives and the Police appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

To the Editors:

Is it intentional, misprint, or oversight that Darryl Pinckney refers to the special status of Palestinian sufferance in 1973 as a cause of black–Jewish enmity [“Blacks & Jews Entangled,” NYR, July 14]? Why 1973? The Palestinian refugee debacle began in 1948. 1973 was most memorable for the Yom Kippur War; Israel’s pain, not Palestine’s. The Palestinian political response, between 1972 and 1974, was particularly heinous and cruel—Munich, Kiryat Shmona, and Ma’alot stand out.

Regardless of how you stand on Palestinian grievances it has nothing to do with the black–Jewish American experience; except when facts from the Israeli–Arab conflict are distorted and conflated to justify others’ bigotry and prejudice. I’m a Jew steeped in America’s race wars (still have the SNCC button Bob Moses, I think, gave me when I was a kid); I know I couldn’t last five minutes as a black man in this American culture, but our communities must bury this hostility, and with all things it begins with trust….

Jonathan Lauter
New York City

Darryl Pinckney replies:

I’m afraid I did have in mind what happened in 1982 when I said black–Jewish relations had taken a turn for the worse in 1973. I can’t pretend I meant Gaza pacification, though that was going on. I am sorry for the error and I very much take Jonathan Lauter’s point. My apologies. But I do remember the sense that by the time of the 1973 war, allegiances had shifted since the 1967 war—and not just in the world of black activists.

The post Blacks, Jews, and Palestine appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Jessica T. Mathews

Judging from the lack of attention to foreign policy in this campaign, one might conclude that few security challenges loom. Other than immigration policy (more a domestic than an international issue), trade, and, occasionally, the Iran nuclear deal, the rest of the world has been largely invisible.

Yet overwhelmingly, the Republican leaders most distraught by Donald Trump’s candidacy are foreign policy and international security experts. In March, 121 of them stated their “united…opposition” to someone “so utterly unfitted” to the job. A second group signed another such letter in August. Others, including former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and former chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, have independently announced their opposition. On a list compiled by The New York Times of the 110 most senior Republican leaders who have said they won’t vote for Trump, no fewer than seventy are foreign policy experts.

The reason for this unprecedented public opposition (notably not shared by economists and domestic policy experts) is that foreign policy practitioners believe the next president will confront perhaps the most dangerous international environment and the broadest and most intimidating set of challenges to US foreign policy since at least the end of the cold war, and arguably longer. Topping the list is a toxic relationship with Russia that neither side expects to improve anytime soon. Russian nationalism, stoked by wars in Crimea, eastern Ukraine, and Syria and by pervasive domestic propaganda, continues to strengthen. At the same time, Russians are experiencing the insecurity that comes with a shrinking economy caused by low oil prices and failed economic reform. Nationalism and insecurity are a dangerous mixture.

Putin is unlikely to purposefully start a war with NATO. But he is likely to challenge the US in ways that could easily escalate. Most dangerous are the Baltics: three tiny NATO-member states on Russia’s border, each with a sizable Russian-speaking population. A manufactured incident (such as Russia created in Ukraine) could provide the pretext Putin needs to take some military action, presenting the alliance, whose core commitment is that “an attack on one is an attack on all,” with a moment of truth.

Ukraine simmers. Any number of possible sequences of events could result in resumed warfare. And Russia will continue to deploy highly effective disinformation campaigns, intelligence operations, and cyberwar to weaken Europe and, in unprecedented attacks, the United States. Some of these things have been done before (including by the US), but today’s technology greatly enlarges their reach and impact.

Putin has ruled Russia for nearly twenty years. He is bold, shrewd, highly experienced, often reckless, and brilliant at playing a weak hand. He is also proud and thin-skinned. For whoever becomes president Putin will be a dangerous opponent.

He is not neutral in this campaign. Though Trump appears to be oblivious to the reason why, it should be no surprise that Putin is doing what he can to tilt the election toward a man he knows to be inexperienced, intemperate, ignorant of history and recent events, and therefore vulnerable to making terrible mistakes. The chance to help elect an American president who was unaware, until recently, that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 (“He’s not going into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down”) and who dismisses the military alliance that is Russia’s principal nightmare (“Whether it [Ukraine] goes in [to NATO] or doesn’t go in, I wouldn’t care”) is not the kind of opportunity a man like Putin misses.

China also poses a risk of aggression fostered by nationalistic sentiment; in China’s case, too, it is compounded by the domestic tensions resulting from slowed economic growth. Beijing’s belligerence in its sweeping claims to nearly all of the South China Sea (against the claims of five other nations), and its construction of artificial islands and military facilities on them, confront Washington with a formidable problem.

The US must insist on the rule of law, support friends and allies in the region without forcing them to choose between the US and China, and make clear that it intends to remain a Pacific power, all without setting off open conflict or erasing the opportunity to work with Beijing where American and Chinese interests coincide. The two will also have to find some way to work together—and with South Korea and Japan—if the US does not want to live with an unstable regime in North Korea armed with nuclear weapons deliverable on long-range missiles. The pace of North Korea’s nuclear testing makes this an urgent task.

This is only the beginning. In the Middle East, a military victory over ISIS won’t mean very much unless stable governance to replace it can be devised in both Syria and Iraq. In Syria, that will require an enormous diplomatic effort to reach a deal that would satisfy in some degree the conflicting interests of Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. It seems unlikely to be achievable without presidential commitment and a greater US willingness to give convincing military backing to its diplomacy. Otherwise, it seems that President Assad, with Russian support, is determined to kill or force out of the country every Syrian who opposes him.

At home, the new president will have to address the overblown antagonism toward trade agreements that has erupted in this campaign. She or he will have to distinguish between the inexorable effects of globalization that we cannot stop and those of negotiated trade deals we can control. Nationally, the economic and geopolitical benefits of trade agreements have far outweighed their costs, but millions of American workers have been selectively hurt by them, and redress is long overdue.

Trump has been right to point to the pain of these inequities but his solutions are utterly wrong. A policy of threats, international arm-twisting, and punitive tariffs will backfire. The Smoot-Hawley act of 1930—legislation that drastically raised US tariffs—showed how quickly tit-for-tat protectionism can become global economic catastrophe.

Rather, the answers lie at home, in a range of policies from tax reform to investment in infrastructure and R&D to education (including vocational education), as well as improved assistance programs for those who lose jobs: all of these responsive to irreversible changes in the global economy.

This daunting list touches only a few of the known challenges; among them should be near-term actions to mitigate the existential threat of long-term climate change. Moreover, unpleasant surprise is almost a certainty. Former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had it right when he said that what he most feared was “events, dear boy, events.” Far more than most, today’s international landscape puts a premium on presidential experience, preparation, and a seasoned national security team.

On top of it all, the next president must address the national indecision over whether the United States wants to remain the major pillar of the international order, as it has been since 1945. Uncertainty about what the US is willing to do internationally is an intensifying cause of domestic polarization and foreign unease. Others are beginning to act based on assumptions about what the US might not do. There is no externally imposed deadline for addressing our ambivalence, but continuing to fail to do so carries a significant, and growing, cost.

Darryl Pinckney

Brexit unnerved a lot of people in the United States. Visitors from London warned that they had underestimated the resentment out there in left-behind England. We should heed the populist threat to take back sovereignty and identity, and we ought to remember that the popular will can be unpredictable, even destructive of the common good. Moreover, the racism in right-wing anti-immigrant politics in Europe was not much different from that in the air at Trump rallies.

However, even if every election is like a referendum in being a chance to express an opinion, the United States isn’t the European Union, an organization you can decide to leave. Most importantly, the racism driving the 2016 presidential campaign is very specifically an anti-Obama backlash: someone who doesn’t look like me is the most powerful man in the West and I’m still freaking out. That an obviously intellectual black man’s two-term presidency has been, on the whole, a success has put the right into a rage. He is their loss of power. They can’t get at President Obama anymore, but they can go all brimstone about Hillary Clinton.

At times the reporting on her health has felt like code for saying that as a woman of a certain age she is maybe not up to the job. Then, too, much anti-woman prejudice is disguised as I-just-don’t-like-Hillary. She first arrived in Washington those years ago, outsider and hick, having made clear during Bill’s campaign for the White House that as First Lady she would not bake cookies. Her power was to be upfront, not behind the scenes. She was that kind of woman, destined for pantsuits and forcing her way to the table. (People maybe also forget that for all his troubles with women, President Clinton respected them for their abilities, and hired them.) That Secretary Clinton and President Clinton are veteran politicians is a liability in the present political climate. They have too much to answer for.

Hillary Clinton has been attacked so many times that survival has made her overly cautious. You could wish for her to be brave, like Angela Merkel, who deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. But think of the hours Clinton has endured before congressional committees, getting grilled, being held to a higher standard, having to prove herself in interviews, while once again by comparison a white guy gets a free ride. Trump can say nearly anything, while her every remark—and what she doesn’t say—is subject to scrutiny. Articles that want to make him seem plausible are more alarming than his campaign. When a presidential candidate of a major American political party is openly admiring of the former head of the Soviet secret police as a national leader, it means that this view has an American constituency.

The Tea Party hijacked the Republican Party and then Trump stole it from them. For all the insurgency of his success in the primaries, he has had to resort in the general election campaign to the Republican Party strategy of the past forty-five years—carry the white South with either an overt or coded racist issue, such as “law enforcement” (formally known as “law and order,” which was revived by Trump during the first debate on September 26), health care entitlement, big government, birtherism, or immigration. Add to the list of traditional provocations the Second Amendment, the white person’s right to become an active shooter. However, the last two presidential contests have shown that, because of demographic change, even when it succeeds Nixon’s southern strategy isn’t enough anymore to give the Republican candidate victory in the Electoral College.

In a recent book, Our Compelling Interests: The Value of Diversity for Democracy and a Prosperous Society, edited by Earl Lewis and Nancy Cantor, the distinguished social analyst William H. Frey observes that in 2011 for the first time more nonwhite babies than white babies were born in the US. Frey talks of the globalized country that the US is becoming, and of the shift toward communities where there isn’t one majority group. Diversity is also an expression of generational difference. The white population is aging, while Hispanics, Frey observes, are younger than the population at large. They account for 16 percent of the US population, are mostly Mexican, and are concentrated primarily in California, Texas, and Florida.

The Republican Party blew it with the Hispanic vote over the immigration issue. Perhaps the Republicans have made into a bloc vote a population they had first courted as though it were not one. Senator Rubio’s old-fashioned immigrant’s narrative of hard work got upstaged by President Obama opening the door to Cuba. After that, no Republican seemed to know what to say to Hispanic-Americans that would not also offend the party’s mean white base.

Meanwhile, the perception of what is mainstream has begun to change. This election could very well demonstrate that our ideas of who constitutes the mainstream and what are majority opinions are already out of date. A lot of eligible voters are single mothers. In another essay in Our Compelling Interest, Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian of American politics, finds it paradoxical that diversity is widely accepted as a social aim at a time of profound income inequality. The lives of Americans have long been determined by racial or ethnic categories, and now America is becoming increasingly segregated by income.

Because conservative objections to universal suffrage have not changed since the first Constitutional Convention—the vote is a privilege, not a right—voting remains for many a radical act. The right tries hard to suppress the minority vote and redraw districts because Republicans know that nationally the demographics are not on their side and therefore control of Congress, governorships, and state legislatures is crucial to their power in the immediate future. One good reason that black people vote as a bloc is because of the historical importance of the courts in American history: some discriminatory voter ID laws got overturned this summer by appellate judges who were Democratic appointees (with one exception).

This election has many asking how much longer the American political process can go on as basically a two-party system. In The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy, MSNBC correspondent Zach Roth suggests that in 2016 money doesn’t necessarily buy the results it used to, that the brute force of Republican tactics faces a movement of the young to expand democracy. The Black Lives Matter manifesto talks of reparations, legislation, and self-determination, not of rebellion.

There is something of that worn-out feeling on the Democratic Party side as well. Maybe Hillary Clinton stands for the last of the baby boomer generation, those idealists from the 1960s who learned to compromise and then refused to get out of the way. They were going to be young forever and look at them now. Clinton will likely win—Nate Silver, hold my hand—but her election as the first woman president in American history does not feel like a moment of celebration, or a new beginning. Maybe the Clintons thought Obama could wait until after the second Clinton, but he had other ideas, and she now offers a caretaker administration until his successors sort themselves out.

Marilynne Robinson

Every four years Americans give themselves information about who they are and where they are on a spectrum of tradition and aspiration that normally frames our politics. The documents that have mattered to us have given us a set of ideals against which actual institutions and practices can be measured, and an abstract and deliberate language for encountering the issues that arise among people, which can, and often do, devolve into visceral and intractable conflict. The origins of these electoral arrangements are to be found in our history. They have been sustained over many generations by an agreed deference to custom and law.

This is to say that they are fragile, and that they are, in a sense, arbitrary. As resilient as they have proved to be through the trials of centuries, when their value and authority are not generally granted they can be overturned and dismissed, suddenly and almost casually. Let the idea take hold that elections are rigged, and popular government begins to seem no more than an illusionary empty exercise. Discredit the press, and the First Amendment is only a license to bloviate and slander. In other words, the viability of our system depends on a certain care, a restraint that avoids unjustified attacks and unfounded accusations against the system itself, and that demands integrity of those who hold positions of authority. If the generations that succeed us have a free press and elected governments, they will have the means to address our failures and their own.

We might well rob them of this birthright. Cynicism and opportunism are rampant at the moment, reinforcing each other and putting a degree of pressure on our institutions they have not felt since the years before the Civil War. They were breached then and disaster followed. Disaster in our time would no doubt be subtler, more insidious. The regional nature of the Civil War meant that the institutions of a large part of the country were not challenged and remained intact. The erosions we see now, epitomized in the appeal of Donald Trump, are at work everywhere, courtesy of the Internet, and of Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and their ilk.

Strangely, for something that has almost the character of a movement, this change in our political culture is visionless, valueless, driven largely by an urge, signaled in taunts and slurs, sometimes realized in restrictive voting laws, to renege on advances we have made in the direction of racial and gender equality. It is true that these advances have been undercut by a neglect of the consequences for many Americans of globalization greatly compounded by policies of austerity and strategies of government paralysis that are the work of politicians who somehow manage to pass themselves off as populists.

Figures such as Newt Gingrich and Dennis Hastert devised means, notably party discipline and routine use or threat of the filibuster, to make the rules of governing obstruct governing. This is the sort of cleverness that discredits orderly process, just as the crowing of a billionaire over his lawful avoidance of taxes discredits the system of taxation. These obstructionists have provoked a frustration in much of the public that aligns with, and perversely affirms, the Reaganesque saw that government is the problem, not the solution.

So Donald Trump, outsider to the political system except in his admitted years of attempting to influence it with his money, is being looked to as an agent of change. His contempt for civilized norms of behavior apparently establishes him in the minds of many as a sort of chainsaw or wrecking ball, potential destroyer of rot and stagnation, though it is equally available to interpretation as the arrogance of a man who can and does sue or buy or finagle immunity from norms and laws, and who, in any case, clearly personifies the money grab that has brought such grief to the economically vulnerable.

We Americans are fond of describing ourselves as a rambunctious lot, history’s incorrigible children, for whom things come right in the end, at least often enough. But the fact is that “we,” the generations before us, have preserved and enhanced some precious ideas, with their attendant customs and traditions, through a tempestuous history—and a very long history, by the standards of societies that have attempted popular government. Restraint and decorum are not traits we look for in ourselves or our culture, and yet there is recently an unprecedented, often remarked, departure from civility and collegiality in our politics that has brought a precipitous decline in the functioning of our institutions. The state of our roads, bridges, and airports is not evidence of the decline of our civilization but the direct result of political calculation on the part of Mitch McConnell. Congress could make us first-world again whenever it chose to, reducing unemployment and stimulating the economy as it did so.

The absence of ordinary respect and truthfulness in Trump’s campaign invites comparison to the rise of foreign demagogues rather than American leaders. Trump takes every challenge as a vicious attack to be answered in kind times two, or ten. An appropriate response to Khizr Kahn’s question, posed at the Democratic Convention, “Have you even read the United States Constitution?” would be “Yes,” or, if honesty required, “It’s next on my list”—not a swipe at his wife.

Trump holds grudges against cabinet makers and beauty queens and the major press indiscriminately, a tendency in him that would be truly alarming if he actually held the reins of power. Why a man born to privilege should be continuously on the defensive, continuously ready to strike back without any reference to the appropriateness of the counterattack or to the grossly disproportionate force he can bring to bear on the perpetrator of some supposed slight, I do not know. An explanation might shed light on the gilded mop and the spray tan, and, perhaps, on the mores of the clans who control our economy.

In any case, Trump looms up before us, an outsized avatar of all that has gone wrong and might yet go wrong. We have to clean up our act. We have to stop tolerating lies and slander. We have to embrace again honesty and equity. We have to be careful to give responsibility every bit of respect it deserves. We cannot sustain our civilization on cynicism and resentment.

Garry Wills

Donald Trump, in his second debate with Hillary Clinton, said in effect, “Make me president so I can throw our former secretary of state into prison.” Does he really think our presidents have the power to purge rivals as in a banana republic? In this weird campaign, it is hard to know what his words mean (if anything). Does anyone, for instance, take seriously his claim that Bill Ayers wrote President Obama’s book Dreams from My Father? How many believe (or care) that he saw thousands of New Jersey Muslims cheering the fall of the World Trade Center? How many really believe that he sent investigators to Hawaii who found out amazing things about Obama’s birth certificate? Or that the verifier of that birth certificate was killed to silence her? These claims are applauded as gestures without necessarily being taken “literally”—only the evil press does that.

How does one break through this jocular incontrovertibility?

One way to evaluate people, a way not often given enough importance, is by a human test of the company they keep—not just the people they meet by job or neighborhood, but ones they seek out or (more important) who seek them out. In his swinging days of the last century, Trump mixed as a celebrity with other celebrities. Some of these, like Roy Cohn, could also be useful to his business; others, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, could help him publicize one of his weddings. But what deeply intellectual or spiritual persons was he familiar with or respected by?

The circle of his trusted intimates is severely constricted—to those he can use or who want to use him. Otherwise he relies on his employees, his sons, and one of his daughters (who are also his employees), along with some of his wives (not all).

Crowds cheer him, but leading Republicans were openly contemptuous of him until he cowed them with fears of losing the Republican base (in every sense) of people angry at Muslims, Obama, and government. People like Chris (“no more Oreos”) Christie, or Ted (“Lyin’ Ted”) Cruz, or John (“not a war hero”) McCain did not so much join him as get run over by him. They are chained to his chariot wheels, prizes of war.

He does not have a circle of friends but an entourage. Where are the historians, philosophers, or poets he admires or who admire him? Whose are the minds that expand, challenge, or refresh his own? He reads nothing. The ghostwriter of his book The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, spent eighteen months interviewing Trump and never saw a book on his desk, in his office, or in his apartment. (Trump thinks the Schwartz book is his own, like everything else in the room.) He knows and talks about little but his own excellence. He cannot learn from peers, since he thinks that he has none. Why consult others when they are, compared with him, losers?

Contrast this with Hillary Clinton’s intimates. I doubt that she has ever lost a friend, from school days on. Her staff has always been fiercely loyal, not out of compulsion but genuine admiration. She is respected by the numerous people she has worked with, for children’s rights, black rights, women’s rights—people like Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison. Among her friends are people of real achievement in various fields. I think of the civil rights historian Taylor Branch. He has been close to Bill and Hillary Clinton since 1972, when the three of them worked as a team for the George McGovern campaign in Texas. Before Hillary joined Bill there, when she was still working on the Nixon impeachment panel in Washington, Bill asked McGovern’s campaign manager, Gary Hart, if he could take a weekend off to go see his girlfriend in Washington. Hart said the McGovern campaign was too important for him to be thinking of girlfriends.

When Hillary Clinton told me that story in 1992, over lunch in Little Rock, she laughed, “Imagine that—from Gary Hart, of all people.” This was after Hart had his own girlfriend trouble with Donna Rice in 1987, and before Bill had his Monica Lewinsky trouble in 1998. I asked Branch, who met privately with the Clintons throughout their time in the White House, how and why Hillary put up with that betrayal. He said, “Because she’s crazy-in-love with him—always has been.” Somehow, the public image created of Hillary Clinton is not that of the intellectual, friend, and crazy-in-love person her many loyal and knowledgeable friends treasure.

I know this human test—who are the friends from whom one gets intellectual and emotional sustenance—is not the serious political analysis pundits are supposed to furrow their brows about. So instead of such touchy-feely stuff we get deep pronouncements of this sort: “Hillary Clinton is the end product of the System (whatever that is). Donald Trump is outside the System (whatever that means). The System has failed (at something, or everything). To escape the System, we must vote for Trump (or anyone) outside it. What do we have to lose?”

Everything, probably.

The post On the Election—IV appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Nothing is sacred. Paul Beatty as an African-American satirist is like his great predecessor Ishmael Reed in his willingness to say not just anything about racial politics and American culture, but what feels like something that had to be said once he’d said it. In his introduction to Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor (2006), Beatty recalls (or pretends to recall) that the summer before he entered ninth grade, having read Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, and E.L. Doctorow when he was eight years old, he received Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, from his Los Angeles school district. It was the first work by a black writer that he’d known, he claims:

I made it through the first couple of pages or so before a strong sense of doom overwhelmed me and I began to get very suspicious…. I ventured another paragraph, growing ever more oppressed with each maudlin passage. My lips thickened. My burrheaded afro took on the appearance and texture of a dried-out firethorn bush…. My eyes started to water and the words to “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” a Negro spiritual I’d never heard before, poured out of my mouth in a surprising sonorous baritone. I didn’t know I could sing. Quickly, I tossed the book into the kitchen trash. For a black child like myself who was impoverished every other week while waiting for his mother’s bimonthly paydays, giving me a copy of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was the educational equivalent of giving the prairie Indians blankets laced with smallpox or putting saltpeter in a sailor’s soup. I already knew why the caged bird sings, but after three pages of that book I now know why they put a mirror in the parakeet’s cage, so he can wallow in his own misery.

This is disdain for Maya Angelou the middlebrow writer. “Thank goodness they didn’t send me her poems.” In his work Beatty argues for a complex black cultural identity, a definition of self not wholly determined by what the larger society or the hood has planned for you. Angelou’s handbag of tears is easy to mock. Beatty’s real target might be the tendency in the education of black youth to urge them to read in order to identify with a work, to value it first of all because they can see themselves in it. He would seem to be someone who has achieved through his reading a sense of what is possible in the wider world, as Ralph Ellison said of Richard Wright. Beatty is also resisting the heaviness of the black autobiographical tradition itself.

Indeed, his first novel, The White Boy Shuffle (1996), is an exuberant parody of the coming-of-age story, with its basketball-playing, up-from-the-ghetto hero at Harvard. It appeared in a time when a number of memoirs were around about the sometimes-hurtful experiences of black students at elite educational institutions. Beatty’s latest novel, The Sellout, in which a son redeems his father’s legacy and finds self-acceptance—and which has just won the 2016 Man Booker Prize—comes at a moment of distinguished yet earnest black father/black son memoirs. Whatever Beatty’s intent, an expansive writer takes over. You have to commit to his paragraphs and then keep up with his wolf packs of sentences.

The first-person narrator of The Sellout is a black man who has never been arrested for anything; nevertheless, in a suit he looks like a criminal, he tells us. He has received a letter from the Supreme Court congratulating him on behalf of the People of the United States of America that his case has been selected from a number of appellate cases to be heard. Included with the letter are coupons to restaurants in Washington, D.C., and directions for how to get to the Supreme Court building by car, subway, and train.

Dickens, California, his hometown, “a ghetto community on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles,” had disappeared, become a nameless suburb. No announcement, signs were simply taken away. Most of its residents didn’t mind being from nowhere. But to bring it back into existence, the narrator established slavery and segregation within Dickens’s former boundaries. For this “heinous” crime, he has been brought before the Supreme Court. “The officers stare at me in amazement. I’m the Scopes monkey, the missing link in the evolution of African-American jurisprudence come to life.” The premise is quickly forgotten and what unfolds in flashback amounts to a vigorous trashing of new and old racial stereotypes and cultural assumptions:

When I was young I had a reputation for being extremely lucky. I never suffered from the typical ghetto maladies. I was never baby-shook. Never contracted rickets, ringworm, sickle-cell trait, lockjaw, early-onset diabetes, or the “’itis.” Hoodlums would jump my friends but leave me alone. The cops somehow never got around to putting my name on a scare card or my neck in a choke hold. I never had to live in the car for a week. No one ever mistook me for that punk who shot, raped, snitched on, impregnated, molested, welched, disrespected, neglected, or fucked over someone’s peoples.

The narrator is not exactly nameless. A descendant of “the Kentucky Mees,” one of the first black families to settle in southwest Los Angeles, his father dropped the final e. Thus, the Supreme Court case “09-2606” is “Me v. the United States of America.” In Dickens he is known by his nickname, “the Sellout.” His ex-girlfriend and only love calls him “Bonbon.” He couldn’t care less about being black, he says. On the US Census form, next to the box marked “Some other race,” he proudly writes “Californian.” But when challenged he will sign next to the box marked “Black, African-American, Negro, coward.” What drive he has does not come from race pride, but rather from “the Oedipal yen.” The desire “to please Father” is powerful even in a neighborhood like his where fatherhood mostly happens “in absentia.” His problem was that “Daddy was always home.”

Me, “the Sellout,” grew up on a farm in an agricultural zone of Dickens with a few farm animals, lemon groves, grapevines, and fields of wheat and Japanese rice. He goes about the town on a horse. In the course of the novel, people crowd onto his property because the smell of manure is preferable to “the Stank” elsewhere in Dickens, Beatty’s black version of the Santa Ana winds.

The narrator never knew his mother, who was a paralegal in Atlanta when he finally tracked her down. He was homeschooled. His first scientific paper, written at age seven, concerned the LA municipal bus system, “Passenger Seating Tendencies by Race and Gender: Controlling for Class, Age, Crowdedness, and Body Odor.” His father, who dodged the Vietnam War draft by fleeing to Canada, was a pioneer of the field of “Liberation Psychology,” replicating famous social science experiments with his son, particularly aversion therapies.

Once when the narrator told his father there was no racism in America, he found himself whisked off to Mississippi, where his father tried to provoke a white mob:

Thanks to years of my father’s black vernacular pop quizzes and an Ishmael Reed book he kept on top of the toilet for years, I knew that “reckless eyeballing” was the act of a black male deigning to look at a southern white female.

His father advised him “to stay away from bitches who love Nina Simone and have faggots for best friends,” because they are the kind of women who hate men. The narrator also remembers that during Black History Month his father would look at the old news footage of Freedom buses burning and caution him, “You can’t force integration, boy.” When he suggested that the slaves might have had a better attitude had they thought of their labor as gardening, his father gave him a beating that would have made Kunta Kinte wince.

Me’s father founded “the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals” back when he noticed that the donut shop was the only non-Latino or black-owned business not burned during the riots. “My father recognized the donut shop was the one place in Dickens where niggers knew how to act.” Donut shop patrons passed back and forth the nondairy creamer and respected Pew Research Center data. Under his father’s direction, the shop began to host regular debates. “And in ten years,” Me tells us,

through countless California cruelties and slights against the blacks, the poor, people of color, like Propositions 8 and 187, the disappearance of social welfare, David Cronenberg’s Crash, and Dave Eggers’s do-gooder condescension, I hadn’t spoken a single word.

His father was also the town’s “Nigger Whisperer,” the guy who defused violent situations involving black people on payday. Every Friday night he was “inundated by teeming hordes of the bipolar poor” getting off the couch to commit either suicide or murder. But in time the father himself ended up a “bullet-riddled body.” Following a traffic incident, police officers shot him in the back. Me couldn’t even bring himself to curse the system. He went off to agricultural college:

Although they’re not hard to grow, and I’ve been selling them for years, folks still go crazy at the sight of a square watermelon. And like that black president, you’d think that after two terms of looking at a dude in a suit deliver the State of the Union address, you’d get used to square watermelons, but somehow you never do.

His satsuma oranges and marijuana plants are superb.

In Beatty’s funhouse revision of social reality things mostly turn out to be something else. That white lynch mob isn’t provoked when the narrator whistles Ravel at a particular white woman. One of them asks if there is “a black buck” she hadn’t fucked “from here to Natchez.” “Well, least she knows what she likes. Your dumb peckerwood ass still ain’t decided whether you like men or not.”

After his father is killed, he muses, “I’d like to say, ‘I buried my father in the backyard and that day I became a man,’ or some other droll American bullshit, but all that happened was that day I became relieved.” The police aren’t held accountable in the killing of his father, but he is able to buy the farm his father never could with the $2 million settlement from the wrongful death suit.

Some people would seem to have their blackness thrust upon them, and in the years since his father’s death Me speaks of having had the courage to wear his self-hatred on his sleeve. Still the neighborhood looks to him to become “the next Nigger Whisperer.” But he is not the natural his father was. While the father seems to be Beatty’s poke at the didactic, contradictory, bullying, sometimes violent, sadistic, race-proud black father figure in recent memoirs, his legacy is nevertheless felt as a serious burden for Me. Me says he didn’t know how to be himself after the disappearance of both his father and his hometown.

He meets others whose blackness is in as bad shape as his own. “Being black ain’t method acting. Lee Strasberg could teach you how to be a tree, but he couldn’t teach you how to be a nigger.” It is Hominy Jenkins, the last of the Little Rascals, who gives Me the idea for how to bring back Dickens. Because his town has lost its identity, so has he. Me’s protective relationship with Hominy, the depraved, has-been black child actor, says that maybe he feels as lost as the relic of bug-eyed, coon-style black comedy. “If he could have figured out a way to stand up on bended knee, he would have.”

Beatty can’t resist inventing one outrageous Little Rascals episode after another for Hominy to relish and regret. Moreover, he has Hominy beg Me to enslave and whip him. Beatty may be sending up another stereotype, yet so much attention to the servile figure of Hominy creates sympathy for him, strangely enough. “That’s the beauty of minstrelsy—its timelessness.” It also gives us a sense of unease: the culture was supposed to be done with this kind of black guy. Me notes how lucid Hominy is when he describes life on the Little Rascals set and begins to see him as someone who has been through something and emerged with his humanity after all.

The black clown is both scapegoat and sage, Beatty says in his introduction to Hokum, and “nigger-themed jokes” are folklore. In The Sellout, the narrator asserts something uncharacteristic, middlebrow, and sentimental: that history isn’t what’s written on paper. “It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.” He has encounters with gang leaders, school teachers, a faded talk show host, a slick attorney, and the secondary characters debate with him, but the characters who matter, more so than even his ex-girlfriend—who tells him she didn’t mind dating a black man who couldn’t fuck, but she refused to date a black man with no sense of humor—are the two father figures, Hominy Jenkins and Me’s father, one representing his feelings of shame, the other his craving for retribution.

Whites laughing at blacks, blacks laughing at whites because they don’t understand what they’re laughing at, blacks laughing at themselves, at other blacks, for the right or wrong reasons—Beatty’s dissent is to saturate the page with riff after riff on the great accumulation of racist imagery in the culture, especially popular entertainment. Comedy has been that place where what could not be said elsewhere got an airing. A safe place for blacks to be in the know, to be in the right.

Satire by black writers in American literature has been aimed at blacks as much as if not more than at whites. It’s partly how they got away with it. The Sellout makes jokes throughout about the collective guilt of blacks that somehow keeps them from showing up for work Monday mornings and “shooting every white motherfucker in the place.” The black comic heritage of laughing to keep from crying, of laughing in order to keep going, is anger management.

“Apartheid united black South Africa,” Me comments; “why couldn’t it do the same for Dickens?” In Dickens, “the supposed Murder Capital of the World,” everyone is black, regardless of race, and degree of blackness is not determined by skin tone or hair texture, “but by whether they said ‘For all intents and purposes’ or ‘For all intensive purposes.’” A gang leader applied for membership in NATO.

Me castrates a calf, and a little girl gets into it as gruesomely as possible. Schoolchildren take part in a book burning. The torched works belong to a series in which the classics are rewritten from a supposedly Afrocentric point of view: Uncle Tom’s Condo, The Point Guard in the Rye, The Great Blacksby, or The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young Protégé, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit.

Early on, Me segregates the bus system. (His ex-girlfriend is a bus driver, so plenty of comedy—and reflection—ensues.) The route is already all black or Latino because of residential segregation and he has to struggle to find a white passenger. Nevertheless, the signs for white and colored on the bus have the effect, he says, of making black people humble, of reminding them how far they’d come and how far they still had to go. In the segregated school, grades and test scores show improvement. They need a certain kind of white person who comes to LA “aspiring to be white…Bel Air white…Bret Easton Ellis white. Three first names white.” Their presence makes black students tuck in their shirts, do their homework, make free throws, and prove their self-worth in the hope of not getting shot or trucked away.

Even so, Döllersheim, Austria, birthplace of Hitler’s maternal grandfather, declines Dickens’s invitation to be its sister city. Me must accept the offer from

the Lost City of White Male Privilege, a controversial municipality whose very existence is often denied by many (mostly privileged white males). Others state categorically that the walls of the locale have been irreparably breached by hip-hop and Roberto Bolaño’s prose.

What blacks and whites now have in common is the complaint “Too many Mexicans.” Me doubts that the murder, mental anguish, rape, and rampant disease that his ancestors experienced was worth it just so he could have Wi-Fi, “no matter how slow and intermittent the signal is.” The Sellout keeps telling us that he is a black man who is a weak man, or used to be. “Maybe I was like every other contemporary artist, I had only one good book, one album, one despicable act of large-scale self-hatred in me.” Probably his relationship to himself, his own identity, and his ambivalent experience of blackness is the most mysterious in the novel. “On the surface Unmitigated Blackness is a seeming unwillingness to succeed.” And yet in the end the narrator is a success, He has put Dickens back on the map, and the Supreme Court case is nowhere.

Race is a nightmare we can’t escape. If we can’t get out or wake up, then Beatty’s defiance is in his absurdist treatment of it. Often there are two or three jokes per sentence. There is rage in such compression. Me says of one comedian on open-mike night at the donut shop that he did more than tell jokes: “He plucked out your subconscious and beat you silly with it, not until you were unrecognizable, but until you were recognizable.” The comedian throws out a white couple that thinks they can laugh at his race jokes:

When I think about that night, the black comedian chasing the white couple into the night, their tails and assumed histories between their legs, I don’t think about right or wrong…. I think about my own silence. Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it’s fear. I guess that’s why I’m so quiet and such a good whisperer, nigger and otherwise. It’s because I’m always afraid. Afraid of what I might say. What promises and threats I might make and have to keep.

Black comedy here is still for a black audience first, because it is a form of instruction or criticism as well as a freeing ritual.

Black militants used to argue that black separatism was nothing like segregation, that it was a coming together in order to find strength, but you wonder if Beatty really means to portray Dickens as a testing of the argument. Me’s father feels strongly that integration can be just a cover-up, and Me himself is skeptical about equality and well-off, right-on people who say they, too, are for it. He doesn’t trust history either. It is easy to say what this novel is about and harder to describe what it might mean. Beatty’s phrases are not empty. He loads them for reasons, probably among the first having to do with the arduousness of being black, the profound self-consciousness of being black; and he has an astonishing facility to invest his takeoffs on racial images with the old power of tribal code.

Beatty is as unafraid as Ishmael Reed to be bookish in his argumentative blackness. He writes, “Unmitigated Blackness is essays passing for fiction.” And it’s not clear that he admires that. The Sellout is fast with references to Fanon, Kafka, Twain, Trey Ellis, Genet, Tolstoy, Erich Maria Remarque, Virginia Woolf, Gwendolyn Brooks, and ghetto verses in the style of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.” The book’s freedom of composition and use of different fonts, foreign languages, relentless puns, mottoes, lists, and one chart also recall the irreverence and cleverness of Fran Ross. Beatty said that it was important to him when he found her weird novel, Oreo.

The ex-girlfriend asks when Me first fell in love with her. He remembers that it was when she went off on his father in the Dum Dum book club he’d convinced her to join. He said she said:

I’m so fucking tired of black women always being described by their skin tones! Honey-colored this! Dark-chocolate that! My paternal grandmother was mocha-tinged, café-au-lait, graham-fucking-cracker brown! How come they never describe the white characters in relation to foodstuffs and hot liquids? Why aren’t there any yogurt-colored, egg-shell-toned, string-cheese-skinned, low-fat-milk white protagonists in these racist, no-third-act-having books? That’s why black literature sucks!

The post Laughing to Keep from Crying appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Two things hit the viewer pretty soon into the Met Breuer’s exhibition of Kerry James Marshall’s beautiful work: figure after figure in his canvases is black, really black, so much so that that blackness becomes his signature. But Marshall’s black people are not Kara Walker’s haunting silhouettes, questioning presences stepping through the scrim of history. The blackness he gives his subjects is luminous, vibrant, and dense.

Secondly, the viewer notes references to other painters, to the history of painting itself. The traditions of Western art are Marshall’s to draw on at will, like everything else in his clearly formidable visual memory. Not for him the struggle of many twentieth-century black American artists who believed that they had to reconcile what they considered contradictory African and European aesthetics. That cultural conflict has passed over; and if anything Marshall’s work is an expression of this artistic freedom.

Kerry James Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955. His family moved to the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1963. In a 2012 interview with Dieter Roelstraete, included in the monograph Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff (2014), Marshall said he was struck by the difference in the light as well as the smog. A teacher gave him drawing lessons; he also paid attention to a drawing program on television. He began to collect images that intrigued him. His obsession with the heroic figures in Marvel Comics coincided with his first visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he saw in person, so to speak, some of what he had only known through books. He seems entirely self-motivated in his quest for understanding how art is made. In Marshall’s telling, finding art books was his secret life away from being a happy guy hanging out with his older brother.

While in high school, Marshall copied various artists’ work from books as a way of studying how they arrived at their individual styles, including the drawings of the black artist Charles White, who was on the faculty of the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Marshall graduated from Otis in 1978, but had started there by seeking out White, sneaking into his life drawing class. White as a youth had inserted himself into an Art Institute of Chicago class that met outdoors. Marshall remembers that White looked at his sketchbook and then moved him to the front of his class where he could see better.

Marshall has said that he recognized that he wanted to make art that was about something: “History, culture, politics, social issues.” But he knew he did not yet have the skills. He moved into abstraction in his work, though he stresses that he had been determined in his education to master representation before he abandoned it. After a period of experimentation, Marshall decided that rather than be one of several abstract artists, such as Norman Lewis, a black Abstract Expressionist maybe not recognized enough in his lifetime, he could make more of a difference doing something else—i.e., the figurative.

Because the overwhelming number of bodies on display in Western art and American advertising were white, he said, it was important for him to produce images of black bodies in order to counter the impression that beauty was synonymous with whiteness. When growing up, he hadn’t seen much by black artists. Their work was in black institutions, not museums, for the most part, and he couldn’t travel to see the murals of Charles White or Hale Woodruff, for instance. However, he knew the collages of Romare Bearden. Marshall found what he needed and went on looking. He could convert everything to his purposes.

Among the earliest works in the Met Breuer show are portraits that belong to what has been called Marshall’s “Invisible Man series.” “That blackness [of blackness] is most black,” the narrator declares in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, published in 1952, and a book that according to Marshall led to a breakthrough for him in the matter of how to render the black body when he read it around 1980. The novel’s theme of the black man as a being unseen because white people choose not to see him inspired Marshall’s black-on-black painting of 1986, Invisible Man. The excellent catalog of the current exhibition, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, edited by Helen Molesworth, notes that it’s hard to perceive the solitary nude figure in the painting because the man and ground are painted in the same black. But stand there long enough and the faint white outline of a partially bent figure turned toward us rises from the black field. A rectangular block of black covers the man’s junk, but the head of his dick is visible nevertheless, perhaps an illustration of another of the novel’s themes: white fear of black male sexuality.

Ellison was the kind of writer who told people how to read him and Marshall does something of the same: he speaks and writes with provocative clarity about his work and art in general. And yet in the Invisible Man series each painting holds a mystery, which is contained in what we see first: white teeth and the white surrounding the black pupils of the eyes. A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980), Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum (1981), in which the previous portrait is depicted as hanging on the back wall of a room, Two Invisible Men (The Lost Portraits) (1985), and Silence Is Golden (1986)—medium-sized and small works—all feature white teeth and the whites of the eyes, with a slight change of expression here or loss of a front tooth there. To what degree is Marshall playing with racist imagery? Is it deliberately evoked in the canvas, or is it in our heads, just waiting for the memory trigger of bug-eyed black comedians in American film and television? The viewer meets versions of the whites of their eyes throughout the exhibition, like the blackness of blackness. But the mystery might be how Marshall manages to give to what appears to be a trope of teeth and eyes the personality of realistic portraiture. It is as though he could turn the black mask into a human face while it was being worn.

His paintings are socially aware. Five huge works of acrylic and collage on unstretched canvas belong to The Garden Project, a series painted in 1994 and 1995 and showing public housing in Los Angeles and Chicago, where Marshall lives. Signs tell us where we are: “Welcome to Rockwell Gardens” in faded red and blue letters in C.H.I.A.; “Welcome to Wentworth Gardens” in the same colors in Better Homes, Better Gardens; “Welcome to Atgeld Gardens” we can still see in Untitled (Altgeld Gardens). But the name of the residence is obliterated in Many Mansions. These are complex compositions, built up in layers, full of allusion, symbol, decoration, color.

In each painting, the housing project, whether towers or garden apartment strips, is at the top, in the distance, or underneath it all. Four of the paintings have shiny ebony figures in the foreground: a young couple strolling; three men in crisp white shirts and black ties prepare a garden for what looks like an Easter egg hunt; and a man in a white shirt but no tie has a takeout picnic by himself with his boom box. Banners have not entirely legible mottoes, bluebirds fly around the signs, flowers dance, and heavenly skies preside.

The sign “Housing Authority City of Los Angeles Nickerson Gardens” in Watts 1963 is the boldest. The paintings don’t contain the images we expect when we think of black public housing. They bustle with tranquility and safety. They reach back to Marshall’s arrival in Los Angeles, when urban developments were relatively new and black people were allowed into some of them. However, the suggestion that all might not be well in the future is in the eyes, subdued, morose, from figure to figure, even the hand-holding teenagers.

In other huge acrylic paintings on unstretched canvas from around this time, Marshall depicts blacks at leisure: children in a backyard on the Fourth of July; a woman waving off two children as they hurry to play; two girls camping out in their backyard at night; a family in the park with croquet mallet, golf club, and a woman on water skis in the distance. But the campfire girls also bring to mind refugees huddled around a fire in a camp. Near them, under the phrase “Here I am,” words such as “covenants” and “Warranty” wrap around a tree, recalling the restrictive covenants that excluded blacks from buying homes in white neighborhoods.

Marshall portrays black people engaged in activities we tend not to connect with the contemporary image of the black, putting black people in places where we don’t expect to find them. But this isn’t ironic Norman Rockwell, far from it. Marshall’s realism is highly stylized, or realism can be one of several elements at his disposal in a single work. His canvases tend to have a lot going on in them all at once. And in his paintings of black infiltration into the suburbs and green spaces there is an insistent kinship among the figures, in the blackness of their skin, once again, but also in the guarded, suspicious, or deadpan expressions in the eyes as they look at or beyond the viewer. The hard gaze keeps the work from being nostalgic.

But even in Marshall’s recreational scenes where the eyes are not visible or the figures are far away, the sense of trespass is strong, because black people do not belong in a sailboat or posed before a seagull-filled sunset. The Edenic or pastoral can become subversive just by having two black figures running through the tall grass, and made almost fantastic by the volume Marshall gives to their hair. Blackness is also a temptation to allegory. Two full-length nude portraits, Frankenstein (2009) and Bride of Frankenstein (2009), are eroticized black specimens, their expressions tight, private. They do not feel like paintings of actual people. Instead, a story is being told, the one about the threat in the black woman’s vagina that we can’t see and in the outline of the man’s hanging thing, and maybe also the story of just who is looking at the play of light on their muscular shoulders and thighs. The only smiling figures in the show are the black girl brandishing her huge breasts in Untitled (Mirror Girl) (2014) and the young man and woman holding hands in Untitled (Club Couple) (2014).

Marshall’s painting sometimes tries to represent popular forms of illustration as well. The borders of two romantic vignettes are as florid as greeting cards. We look into Souvenir I (1997) as into a proscenium and see a black woman with wings of gold glitter tending to flowerpots on a white marble coffee table in a living room. A tapestry on the wall on the side commemorating the lives of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King is as prominent as the black woman. Floating in clouds above her are photo-screenprint images of the four black girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing in 1963, the three Freedom Riders murdered in Mississippi in 1964, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, slain in 1963, and two Black Panthers, Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, murdered by the FBI in Chicago in 1969. It isn’t so much that the painting is kitsch as that it captures the taste of the first black suburban generation, the impression of those new middle-class ranch house interiors of gold and pale green.

The painting belongs to a series not all of which is on exhibit at the Met Breuer. Marshall has explained that the lush, gestural marks of classical painting seemed inappropriate to the mood. He wanted something restrained. Instead of building up the colors in layers, he mixed the paint beforehand and applied it smooth and flat where it was supposed to go. Even in The Lost Boys (1993), in memory of the victims of police shootings, he wants the viewer to think beyond the blackness of the figures to the tonal relationships in the composition, the mastery of surface in paint that he believes he accomplishes.

This is history painting. The Land That Time Forgot (1992) is about the white settling or invasion of South Africa. As with work that has a strong narrative element, the more you know of the story the more you see. Voyager (1992) depicts Wanderer, a slave ship that landed in the US in 1858, though the importation of slaves had been outlawed in 1807. Black Painting (2003–2006) is a black-on-black work that may depict Fred Hampton and his girlfriend in the dark silence of their sleep before the FBI raid, a Panther flag visible on the wall and a copy of Angela Davis’s If They Come in the Morning on the bedside table.

Some of his portraits are of black historical figures of whom there is no actual visual record: the eighteenth-century black American painter Scipio Moorhead; Nat Turner, leader of a slave uprising in Virginia in 1831; or Cato, leader of the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina in 1739. In one painting, Harriet Tubman’s wedding portrait is being hung in a museum, perhaps.

As a history painter, Marshall seems to be going against the grain, even among black artists. He sometimes recalls the cultural nationalist days of street murals and their lessons in black history. His black portraits can have the Negro History Week solemnity of woodcuts by White, Woodruff, and Elizabeth Catlett. Is this art for a black or a white audience, work by a black artist in strongly black Chicago, far enough away from the New York market? We are not surprised that Marshall as a student looked at Schiele and Klimt. It is where someone interested in the modern female nude would go. Included in the Met Breuer exhibition is a gallery of paintings chosen by Marshall from the Metropolitan Museum collection. Bonnard and Ad Reinhardt, of course, you think, but the presence of an exquisite Ingres nude in monochrome is important. Marshall was perhaps also influenced by the Chicago artist Leo Golub’s use of unstretched canvases. But whatever he was looking at, this is American painting.

In Marshall’s SOB, SOB (2003), a black girl is seen on a staircase landing, seated on the floor before a partially visible bookcase. We can read some of the spines, titles familiar in Black Studies. Maybe the “sob” speech bubbles refer to what she did not know about blacks in history. A volume entitled Africa Since 1443 is unopened in front of her. She is in the same pose as the invalid girl with her back to us dragging her body through Andrew Wyeth’s field. Moreover, Marshall is attempting to recreate an old look using polymer-based paint, a medium invented in the 1960s, in the time of pop art, and there seems something very American in this aspect of Marshall’s project as well.

His tradition of American art includes black artists such as Horace Pippin, William Edmondson, and Bill Traylor, the taught and the self-taught. Absorption into the mainstream can mean denying ethnic or ancestral influences, he has warned. His aggressive portraits include four of painters, idealized figures, black men and black women in rich, colorful fabrics who stare down the viewer. Either they hold enormous palettes or behind them stand paint-by-number charts of the poses we can see them in, waiting to be filled with color. But Marshall opposes a black nationalism that resists participating in anything that seems like white culture. He finds that that attitude has a limiting effect, while he himself, he’s said, is more interested in pushing a thing as far as he can.

It was interesting to hear in the exhibition rooms the guides explain to groups of visitors Marshall’s relationship to the traditions of Western art: this is like Renaissance portrait painting in that the figure occupies the center of the canvas and the line along which the eyes fall makes the cross. But what we are responding to is not a black art that can meet white academic tests, but the intensity of the work itself, the pain and problems of painting. Whether a small collage or a monumental effort, Marshall sets himself great challenges, as though his true subject were how difficult it was to execute that particular work. To the realism of 7 am Sunday Morning (2003), another acrylic on unstretched canvas, a tribute to Edward Hopper and Gerhard Richter, Marshall will add the surprise of lens flare to the right side of the canvas, raising the question of perspective, who is holding the camera, what camera.

De Style (1993), a barbershop scene, was one of the first works that Marshall was able to conceive on a large scale, in the space of his then-new studio in Chicago. Building it up was like a matter of engineering, he said. The barber, his head crowned by rays of a holy spirit, is about to take shears to a customer’s head in the center of the picture, though everything around the customer seems to ignore that he is in the center. The barber and the man under the pink-striped sheet in the chair are flanked on either side by two figures, a standing black man and a seated black woman. Maybe they are just hanging out. The black barbershop is a club, a meeting place. They have elaborate hairdos, hers as high as a bishop’s mitre, his the shape of a headdress from some adoration of the magi scene, and so they don’t seem to be there for haircuts.

We can see only the T-shirt, black arms, khaki pants, and sneakers of a fifth person seated next to the woman. Posters, newspaper clippings, and reflections in the mirror behind the barber add to the number of black heads in the painting. The hair products on the counter are carefully observed. The figures all look out, the veiled expression in their eyes making the viewer the stranger who has interrupted a conversation.

De Style is answered by School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012), the glory of the exhibition. Monumental in scale, set in a beauty parlor, eight black women, some dressed in African prints, most seen in the middle distance with their backs to the viewer, have amazing headdresses of hair, weave jobs. Men are present, hidden, unremarked on, except for one man whose reflection we can see in a mirror against the back wall, as he takes a photograph of the woman posing voluptuously, unsmilingly, in the foreground. At the same time, he captures the rear end of a woman in sexy blue heels bent over directly in front of the mirror. Maybe one of the women reacts to what he’s doing. Two toddlers occupy the center foreground, losing interest in what might be a cardboard head of a white blond woman. It’s an impossible picture to sum up, given the colors, shapes, directions, and details. Busy as Jan Steen, the saying goes. Marshall has said that for him beauty is an understanding of the relationship of parts. The power is in the sheer painting and in the attitude conveyed. We are in the middle of things and these black women are attending to their beauty, but they are not performing primitivism for the viewer.

In some of his other paintings, music notes and rhythm-and-blues lyrics swirl around a romantic couple dancing after just after having finished a meal—that is not excitement in her eyes—or as another couple undresses in a bedroom. The woman is looking out in a way that says she will keep taking things off even though the viewer is there. Images of white women hang from a tree, maybe like bad fruit, over a reclining black couple under a blanket on the ground in They Know That I Know (1992). Marshall’s paintings examine the way the black body has been scrutinized, especially that of black women. He has his own mysticism. A black woman levitates under the spell of a black magician in When Frustration Threatens Desire (1990), with references to black cats, snakes, severed hands, root work, fortune-tellers, and numerology. And always the hard eyes that will not let Marshall’s figures lose their cool. As he notes in Kerry James Marshall (2000):

In the black community there’s great resistance to extreme representations of blackness. Some people are unable to see the beauty in that. So I’ve been very conscious of the way I render my figures. I try to give them subtlety and grace and there’s a delicacy in the way I handle the features, especially the lines and contours. Extreme blackness plus grace equals power. I see the figures as emblematic; I’m reducing the complex variations of tone to a rhetorical dimension: blackness. It’s a kind of stereotyping, but my figures are never laughable.

Untitled (Studio) (2014) presents the workplace, the backstage, preparatory side of things. We are looking at most of a work-in-progress of a black woman in three-quarter profile. Next to it is a table laden with tools of the trade and objects that conjure up classical still life. In the distance a black male nude model waits in front of canvases turned toward the wall. Closer to us, behind a red drop, another black male model is getting dressed. He is looking over his left shoulder toward a woman who has maybe just come in, sat down, and put her purse under the chair. She is wearing street clothes and sandals. The punch of the painting is that the woman manipulating the sitter’s head probably isn’t an assistant. She is the painter.

Even the suburbs in the US are segregated and maybe Marshall is right: we accept the absence of white people in his work, but never grow accustomed to the extreme blackness portrayed in canvas after canvas. It is an asserted presence every time and the question remains: How much is in what we see and how much are we interpreting what we see according to our own notions of what being black means? History painting waits to detach itself from its known world and journey into the future as pure painting, but maybe there is no such thing, and certainly not when it comes to the black figure, given for how many centuries ideologies of race and racism have been built up in the West. Art historians had some difficulty in identifying a recently discovered painting as a sixteenth-century portrait of the Chafariz d’el Rei, or king’s fountain, in Lisbon. At first they couldn’t say where it was, not only because there are as many black people as white people in the busy street scene, but also because some of the black people are richly dressed. One black man is prominently displayed on horseback.

Ralph Ellison rejected the cult of the primitive, because to him the emphasis on black culture as emotional, musical, sensual, creative, and the opposite of mechanistic white society represented an insult, the feminization of the black race. Marshall is with him on that, hence the eyes as keys to the locked soul. But Marshall is crucially of the Black Is Beautiful generation, psychologically, and what black artist from that time of cultural consciousness, the weaponized aesthetic, needs white permission to find desirable black women with big asses? Kehinde Wiley, a most eloquent man, told a Festival Albertine audience at the French consulate in New York not long ago that when he was a student at Yale, Kerry James Marshall visited his studio and after a while said that the light on the flesh in his paintings was wrong, that he had not paid attention to the way the light fell across the body. He told him to go look at Rubens.

The post The Genius of Blackness appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

When James Baldwin died in 1987, at the age of sixty-three, he was seen as a spent force, a witness for the civil rights movement who had outlived his moment. Baldwin didn’t know when to shut up about the sins of the West and he went on about them in prose that seemed to lack the grace of voice that had made him famous. But that was the view of him mostly on the white side of town. Ever-militant Amiri Baraka, once scornful of Baldwin as a darling of white liberals, praised “Jimmy” in his eulogy as the creator of a contemporary American speech that we needed in order to talk to one another. Black people have always forgiven and taken back into the tribe the black stars who got kicked out of The Man’s heaven.

Baldwin left behind more than enough keepers of his flame. Even so, his revival has been astonishing. He is the subject of conferences, studies, and an academic journal, the James Baldwin Review. He is quoted everywhere; some of his words are embossed on a great wall of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Of all the participants and witnesses from the civil rights era, Baldwin is just about the only one we still read on these matters. Not many pick up Martin Luther King Jr.’s Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958) or The Trumpet of Conscience (1967). We remember Malcolm X as an unparalleled orator, but after the collections of speeches there is only The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964), an as-told-to story, an achievement shared with Alex Haley. Kenneth Clark’s work had a profound influence on Brown v. Board of Education, but as distinguished as his sociology was, nobody is rushing around campus having just discovered Clark’s Dark Ghetto (1965).

Baldwin said that Martin Luther King Jr., symbol of nonviolence, had done what no black leader had before him, which was “to carry the battle into the individual heart.” But he refused to condemn Malcolm X, King’s supposed violent alternative, because, he said, his bitterness articulated the sufferings of black people. These things could also describe Baldwin himself in his essays on race and US society. He may not have dealt with “this sociology and economics jazz,” as Harold Cruse complained of him in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), but the reconstruction of America was for him, even in his bleakest essays, firstly a moral question, a matter of conscience. And at his best he simply didn’t need the backup of statistics and dates. When it came to The Fire Next Time (1963), the evidence of his experience, the truth of American history, he could take perfect flight on his own.

Nothing breaks the spell cast by James Baldwin in Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro. One of the things that makes Peck’s documentary so intense as a portrait of Baldwin, the engaged black writer, is that there are no talking heads, no one else making judgments or telling anecdotes about him or what he did. This is his public self, yet somehow deeply personal. Footage from fifty years ago has King, Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte, the head of a white citizens’ council, and J. Edgar Hoover talking to the camera. Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss is a fellow guest on The Dick Cavett Show and doesn’t know what hit him. But the film’s attention is on Baldwin, his words above all others.

There is wonderful black-and-white footage of Harlem in the late 1950s and early 1960s when we hear Baldwin’s words about missing his family while he lived in France, but the film has little in the way of biography and it is not structured chronologically. For a documentary that hardly discusses his work—there is a shot of “Letter from a Region of My Mind,” the longer essay from The Fire Next Time, as it appeared in The New Yorker in 1962—Peck’s commitment to Baldwin’s voice is total. Not just anyone can hold your attention for two hours, which is perhaps why it does not matter how much the viewer does or does not know about James Baldwin.

Everything he says on camera is interesting, moving—his face so expressive, his diction original and precise. In his accent, his way of speaking in rapid clause clusters, he sounds like Leslie Howard, the romantic British actor of the 1930s.

Peck shows how riveting Baldwin’s writing is, like his speaking voice, “tough, dark, vulnerable, moody,” how inspired his ear. I Am Not Your Negro is divided into sections and so the screen will say, “Paying My Dues,” “Heroes,” “Witness,” “Purity,” and “Selling the Negro.” Maybe they are meant to introduce different themes, but each section is composed of the same elements, old and new clips of police confrontations, shots of city streets at night or river banks or views of skies as seen up through the trees of different places where the restless Baldwin traveled. Moments of the blues alternate with show tunes or Alexei Aigui’s music written for the film. It comes together as a general emotional intensity, largely because of the sheer personality of Baldwin’s language.

We have Baldwin, apologizing for sounding like an Old Testament prophet, but mostly we hear the actor Samuel L. Jackson in unhurried voice-over reading—or saying—long passages from Baldwin. He starts with a letter Baldwin wrote in the early summer of 1979 to his agent, proposing a book to be called Remember This House that would examine the lives of three black martyrs of the freedom struggle: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. It would mean a journey back to the South and painful memories, concentrating on the years from 1955, when we first heard of Reverend King, to King’s death in 1968.

Peck tells us that Baldwin left only thirty pages of notes on the proposed book. (If the film has information the viewer needs, then Peck will impart it by means of typewriter noise producing white letters on a black screen.) Peck composed his script by drawing from some of Baldwin’s uncollected writings, maybe a bit from The Fire Next Time, as well as from two extended essays, No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976), both included in Baldwin’s collected essays.

In the beginning of his film, Peck juxtaposes smoky black-and-white and Technicolor footage of Baldwin with high-resolution still photographs of Black Lives Matter demonstrations. A line from Baldwin heard later in the film is about how history is not the past; history is the present. Throughout, Peck makes connections between what is going on today and what Baldwin was protesting decades ago. His urgency had a point, and still does, the clip of a Ferguson, Missouri, riot says.

We hear lines from No Name in the Street, in which Baldwin is remembering the fall of 1956, when he was living in Paris:

Facing us, on every newspaper kiosk on that wide, tree-shaded boulevard, were photographs of fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts being reviled and spat upon by the mob as she was making her way to school in Charlotte, North Carolina. There was unutterable pride, tension, and anguish in that girl’s face as she approached the halls of learning, with history, jeering, at her back.

It made me furious, it filled me with both hatred and pity, and it made me ashamed. Some one of us should have been there with her!… It was on that bright afternoon that I knew I was leaving France. I could, simply, no longer sit around in Paris discussing the Algerian and the black American problem. Everybody else was paying their dues, and it was time I went home and paid mine.

Meanwhile, Jackson is speaking over those photographs of Dorothy Counts. We get to look into her face, and wonder how light-skinned she was, but we also can see clearly the faces of the white boys taunting her.

A few of the images may be familiar from other documentaries: deputies prodding King and Abernathy onto the pavement with batons, probably in Selma; a black man shoved up against a wall in Watts in 1965 gets in a blow at a surprised cop and is answered by three or four wildly swinging batons; they are swinging again in 1992, beating Rodney King, and not just for a few seconds of video either. Then there is Ferguson, Missouri. I Am Not Your Negro climaxes in what are probably mug shots of the Scottsboro Boys from 1931 that lead into recent images of police struggling with black men and assaulting black women. At another point, the faces and names of recent child victims of police killings fade in and out.

But one of the strongest features of Peck’s film is how much we see of ordinary white people and their violent resistance to integration in the 1950s and 1960s. In the course of the film, we see howling young white males, some mere boys, carrying signs painted with swastikas and tracking demonstrators; the National Guard escorting black school children through the gauntlet of angry faces in Little Rock. One of the most shocking sequences shows white men attacking what must be lunch counter sit-in protesters. It is color footage from 1960 or 1961. The violence has not been choreographed. It is sudden and raw. The hatred of black people is out there. The unguarded face of the South contrasts with images that play when Jackson is reading what Baldwin has to say about the myths and ignorance reinforced by American cinema.

The Devil Finds Work is a memoir of Baldwin’s childhood and youth in the form of his reflections on films that made an impression on him or that express something about how dangerous American innocence is when it comes to race. Jackson’s voice-over: “I am about seven. I am with my mother, or my aunt. The movie is Dance, Fools, Dance.” Suddenly, there she is, dancing away with her long legs in that 1931 film:

I was aware that Joan Crawford was a white lady. Yet, I remember being sent to the store sometime later, and a colored woman, who, to me, looked exactly like Joan Crawford, was buying something. She was so incredibly beautiful…and looked down at me with so beautiful a smile that I was not even embarrassed. Which was rare for me.

About his schoolteacher, Orilla Miller, as Baldwin recalled her in The Devil Finds Work:

She gave me books to read and talked to me about the books, and about the world: about Spain, for example, and Ethiopia, and Italy, and the German Third Reich; and took me to see plays and films, plays and films to which no one else would have dreamed of taking a ten-year-old boy…. It is certainly partly because of her…that I never really managed to hate white people—though, God knows, I have often wished to murder more than one or two….

From Miss Miller, therefore, I began to suspect that white people did not act as they did because they were white, but for some other reason, and I began to try to locate and understand the reason. She, too, anyway, was treated like a nigger, especially by the cops, and she had no love for landlords.

While we have been listening to Samuel Jackson, among the images we have also been watching are black-and-white photographs of black children at their school desks; a young Haile Selassie and his court; German children waving Nazi flags; film of Nazi book burnings; and lastly a still photograph of Miss Miller herself:

It is not entirely true that no one from the world I knew had yet made an appearance on the American screen: there were, for example, Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best and Manton Moreland, all of whom, rightly or wrongly, I loathed. It seemed to me that they lied about the world I knew, and debased it, and certainly I did not know anybody like them—as far as I could tell….

Yet, I had no reservations at all concerning the terror of the black janitor in They Won’t Forget. I think that it was a black actor named Clinton Rosewood who played this part, and he looked a little like my father. He is terrified because a young white girl, in this small Southern town, has been raped and murdered, and her body has been found on the premises of which he is the janitor…. The role of the janitor is small, yet the man’s face hangs in my memory until today.

And there is the scene of the janitor in his cell, on his bunk, filmed from above, the white faces looking down at him not visible to the audience. He cringes, sweats, and begs, a scene followed by footage from a silent film of 1927, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Baldwin’s words that because Uncle Tom refused to take vengeance he was no hero to him as a boy:

In the case of the American Negro, from the moment you are born every stick and stone, every face, is white. Since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6 or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.

The photographs of the massacre at Wounded Knee are a surprise when they turn up.

Before Peck’s film ends, Richard Widmark will scream, “Nigger, nigger, nigger” in a clip from No Way Out (1950), a radical movie for its time, also starring Sidney Poitier, whom Baldwin does not blame for the ridiculousness of the films The Defiant Ones (1958), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), or In the Heat of the Night (1967). A scene from another Poitier film, Raisin in the Sun (1961), moves into Baldwin’s memoir of the play’s author, Lorraine Hansberry, and one of the last times he saw her on her feet, at a historic confrontation with Robert Kennedy, in June 1963. After a frosty farewell to the attorney general, Hansberry walked out of the meeting. Hansberry was thirty-four years old when she died of cancer. Baldwin remembers how young everyone was in those days, even Bobby Kennedy.

The use of clips is clever and they in themselves are often marvelous. We can hear a serious point being made about, say, the American idea of democracy as material abundance and the screen will fill with something like a mad dance at a picnic from the 1957 musical The Pajama Game. Or Doris Day could be singing along after some sharp analysis concerning America’s infantilism. The clips complement Baldwin’s way of moving from paradox to paradox.

But American identity and its consequences are not just commented on through Hollywood cliché. Part of what makes Peck’s film visually captivating is how unexpected some of his images are: a Department of Commerce film from the 1950s reminding retailers not to neglect the lucrative market of a new Negro middle class is somewhat bizarre, for example. Color footage of hangar-size supermarkets of the 1950s, of white boys as well as white girls at poolside beauty pageants—a world made possible, Baldwin would say, by the blacks we see working in the cotton fields and in the photographs of the lynched. Whites want to see the happy darkies of their food and appliance magazine and television ads, including Godfrey Cambridge singing the Chiquita banana song.

Some of the most moving footage in the film captures Baldwin in debate with William F. Buckley Jr. at Cambridge University in 1965. Peck leaves out Buckley’s side entirely. We don’t even see his face. Peck takes what he needs—just Baldwin speaking to the motion before the house, “Is the American Dream at the Expense of the American Negro?” It is footage that Peck returns to in his film, ending with the whole Cambridge Union Society on its feet for a startled Baldwin. Those white British students had probably never heard anyone say such things before. “What has happened to white southerners is much worse than what has happened to Negroes there.”

What I Am Not Your Negro cannot do is tell us much about Baldwin’s relationship to Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, or Martin Luther King Jr., because Baldwin couldn’t either, really. He met them, interviewed them, supported them, appeared with them, and loved them, he said. But he didn’t really know them, much as he identified with them, especially after their deaths. Baldwin was probably closer in temperament to Malcolm X, another son of the Harlem streets and renegade from his church, than he was to King.

Evers, an officer of the NAACP in Mississippi where he was investigating the murder of a black man in his county, was killed in 1963. “Then the music stopped, and a voice announced that Medgar Evers had been shot to death in the carport of his home, and his wife and children had seen that big man fall.” Malcolm X was killed in 1965. “The headwaiter came, and said there was a phone call for me.” King was killed in 1968. “The phone had been brought out to the pool, and now it rang.” The essay No Name in the Street is Baldwin’s attempt to describe, maybe even to cope with, his grief following the chances that were lost to the country after so many murders and so much political violence.

Many people had become more militant in the years between the March on Washington in 1963 and H. Rap Brown’s assertion in 1967 that violence was as American as cherry pie. I Am Not Your Negro reminds us of King’s opposition to the Vietnam War. Baldwin sometimes talked about the thin line between being an actor and a witness. As a survivor, he became a kind of keeper of the flame himself, but at a cost. He wrote, “‘Vile as I am,’ states one of the characters in Dostoevski’s The Idiot, ‘I don’t believe in the wagons that bring bread to humanity.’” It’s interesting that Peck has assembled his script not from the early essays, “classic” Baldwin, so to speak, but mostly from the spleen of his late work and articles that were once dismissed. You didn’t have to be a Marxist or a black cultural nationalist to be radical. Peck’s film, based on one of Baldwin’s unrealized works, is a kind of tone poem to a freedom movement not yet finished.

Twenty-five years ago, when Spike Lee released his film Malcolm X, which was based, in part, on the screenplay Baldwin had given up on around the time King was killed, articles appeared expressing worry that the film might incite black youth to violence. But Black Lives Matter can do without the macho. It represents a generation in agreement with Baldwin when he said that he no longer believed in the lies of pretended humanism. Activists today start where he ended up. At the core of his message was always the assertion that there was no Negro problem; there was the problem of white people not being able to see themselves, to take responsibility for their history, and to ask themselves why they needed to invent “the nigger.” “I am not a nigger. I am a man,” Baldwin says toward the end of the film, cigarette smoke escaping from him.

The post Under the Spell of James Baldwin appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The Oscar-winning film Moonlight gives an impression throughout of being tinged with the color blue. Already in the beginning, after a blue car, its blue interior, white T-shirt and pillow tinted blue by morning light, blue sneaker soles, and blue plastic trash cans at the beach, comes an extraordinary scene of a black man holding a black boy’s body on top of the ocean, the camera lowered until it is fractionally submerged, enclosing the baptism by swimming lesson in pale sky and rolling water.

“So your name is Blue?” the boy, Little, asks after he has learned that he can be free in the waves. “Naw,” Juan, his savior, answers. He has told the troubled boy that black people are everywhere, that we were the first people on this planet. He is from Cuba, where there are also black people, though you wouldn’t know it—to look at the Cubans in Miami, he means. Juan tells Little that he used to be a wild little shorty like him, running around with no shoes when the moon was out. An old woman saw him “cutting a fool”—it’s not always possible to get what he’s saying—and told him that in the moonlight “black boys look blue.”

Moonlight is a love story in a place where we don’t usually find a gay one and at the same time it’s very different from other black films set in the ’hood, mostly because of what it doesn’t focus on. We don’t hear gunfire and there is no pounding soundtrack, just as it has no bohemian artists or middle-class triumphalism about family. It’s about a homo thug from that street world of the fatherless where masculine pride is supposedly all and tests of manhood are brutal. But Moonlight isn’t trying to be realistic about anything, even as it confounds what we expect from stories about young black men, starting with the film’s texture, its intricate soundtrack, tantric pace, and beauty frame by frame.

An elliptical growing-up-lonely story, the film concentrates on three stages in a gay man’s life—the chapter titles say, “i. Little,” “ii. Chiron,” “iii. Black”—each episode separated by a decade or so. The film begins maybe in the early 1990s, when “Little” is a bullied, neglected schoolboy. Juan, a drug boss, rescues him from a boarded-up apartment in a block of “dope holes.” A solitary kid tormented between school and a home where he is not wanted is drawn to a protective stranger. But even as a refuge from Little’s crack-addicted mother, the nobility of surrogate fatherhood doesn’t overcome what could be called modern puritanical society’s disquiet at the homoerotic scene of a dark-skinned black man cradling his miniature in the vast blue.

In Jenkins’s film, the homoerotic moves the story, including the quickly established bond between the physically powerful man and the vulnerable child. “What’s a faggot?” “A word used to make gay people feel bad,” Juan answers. And it might say more about us than it does about the film that we are surprised that a gangsta character gives a child a thoughtful explanation. Or maybe Juan is touched by the boy’s suffering when he asks, “Am I a faggot?” After all, we know nothing about Juan other than what we have seen. His girlfriend is gorgeous. He tells Little that it’s okay to be gay, he’ll know when he knows, and he doesn’t have to know now, but he can’t let anyone call him “a faggot,” in the same spirit as teaching him not to sit with his back to a door—a call to Little’s sense of self-preservation.

The film may not depict the territorial violence of the crack trade, but it does not shy away from showing the effects over time of both the drug epidemic and the war on drugs in a black community such as Liberty City, in northeast Miami. When we first see Little’s mother, she is wearing a badge and maybe the uniform of a low-level health care worker. She goes downhill fast. Little comes home to find that the TV has vanished. In one scene of no dialogue, we see him pour into a tub a pot of water he has heated on the stove. He takes a bath in dishwashing liquid. He must like the suds, and ignores the bar of soap. In another silent scene, we don’t hear what his mother—played with grit by Naomie Harris—is screaming at him; we only see her terrible face and his expression of bottomless misery.

But the film’s originality isn’t just in what Jenkins turns the volume way down on. It’s what he makes room for. Little has a cute buddy, Kevin, who tries to look out for him. Kevin advises him that in order to get people to stop picking on him, it is not enough not to be soft, he has to show them that he isn’t. Kevin also vouches for him when Little happens on Kevin with four other boys engaged in a schoolyard rite: comparing dicks. We see Little dancing seriously by himself among other girls and boys, all dressed alike, in some school exercise. But on the playing field he is the boy outside the scrum, the boy backing away from the rag ball.

In the second episode, “Chiron,” the boy and his mother live in a different, much more untidy apartment and he can’t defend her reputation as the crackhead whore in the street. She blackmails him out of the money Juan’s girlfriend gives him. Juan is dead. We last see him hanging his head in shame after Little has walked out because Juan admitted that he sold drugs to people like his mother. We assume his death was drug-related, though nothing of the kind is suggested in the film. We know from his girlfriend that he and Little remained close, after all, and it seems clear that he didn’t put the boy to work for him.

Little is by now in high school, still bullied, but valiantly insisting on his given name, Chiron. Kevin is still cute. He gets detention for having sex with a girl in a stairwell, a session he describes to Chiron in raunchy, turned-on slang. Chiron has a wet dream about Kevin banging a girl doggy-style at the beach. “You all right, Black?” Kevin turns and smiles at him in the dream. It is Kevin who gives Chiron the nickname “Black.” One night when he himself has fled to the beach, Chiron meets Kevin; they share a blunt, have sympathetic but awkward conversation: “You cry?” “It makes me want to.” The kiss is tender. Kevin undoes Chiron’s belt and gives him a hand job, then wipes his palm in the sand. He doesn’t ask for anything reciprocal. Or what he needed was a chance to heal or at least comfort someone else as lonely. Kevin drives Chiron home and they part in a democratic handshake.

But the next day he has to beat the shit out of Chiron or the pack will beat the shit out of him. Jenkins is all too good at indicating what a futile place the classroom has become at this income level, however prepared the teacher is to explain the structure of DNA. Chiron soaks his face in a sink of ice water and when he goes back to school rather satisfyingly clobbers the instigator of the beating with a chair. He looks out at Kevin from the squad car about to take him off to the urban black youth’s fate of being sucked into the penal system. The sounds we hear are those of an orchestra tuning up.

Kevin, the love Chiron seeks and finds, the boy who had the imagination to show him physical affection, tells him at one point that he got sent up for some stupid shit, the same stupid shit they all got sent up for. Once again we take that to mean a reference to the drug business. Incarceration has taken place entirely offscreen. Yet the film conveys how pervasive the justice system is in black lives.

When we see Chiron next, in the third episode, more or less in the recent past, he is now known as “Black” and has become, like Juan, a big, intimidating drug dealer, a taciturn man with abs to commit suicide over, in a subdued vintage car. “At some point you got to decide for yourself who you going to be,” Juan told him. “Can’t let nobody make that decision for you.” It’s interesting that as much of an outcast as Chiron is shown to have been when growing up, Jenkins does not make him an arty type. He has no hobbies. In some ways, he seems harder and more detached as a drug boss than Juan was. He lives in Atlanta, gets a call, and agrees to see his mother. She is living and working in a rehab facility; we’re not sure where. She asks for and receives his forgiveness.

Another call turns out to be from Kevin, who has tracked him down. He apologizes for “all the shit what happened.” Both actors can wait out a silence. The camera can just sit and sit on their faces and we are getting a great deal, reading things into their changing expressions. Kevin works as a cook and waiter in a diner in Miami that has a jukebox of oldies. Some dude played a song that made him think of Chiron.

In the very beginning, even before the credits, in the dark, we hear the ocean and then under that a song by the Jamaican Boris Gardiner from the 1970s, “Every Nigger Is a Star,” used in a Blaxploitation film of the period. The song was rediscovered by hip-hop artists in the 1990s and turns out to be playing on the radio of a blue Chevy Impala we see driven by a tough-looking dude. That rough word in a gentle ballad—this sets up the film’s aesthetic, which is to find new relations for contradictory, seemingly incompatible elements, images, or ideas. Jenkins’s unfiltered background buzz has a Robert Altman–like quality, and several scenes play out in the quiet of the ’hood, sirens and dogs far away, or scenes are filled with ocean breeze. Passages from Mozart’s Laudete Dominum play over a boys’ soccer game, and Nicholas Britell’s score has a classical aura.

The song Kevin ends up playing for Black, his lost love, is a throwback, “Hello Stranger” by Barbara Lewis. It’s all over YouTube now, as is analysis of the film and its codes. “It seems like a mighty long time/Chu bop chu bop, my baby….” The song has been performed by other singers down through the years, but it would have been an oldie when Kevin and Black were teenagers, if either of them heard it back then. We have no way of knowing. There is no social life in Chiron’s adolescence, only dysfunction. But the nostalgic tune—from black life before the crack plague—uncovers what is between them, because theirs is such an old-fashioned love story. If Black has denied himself, then the love he accepts in the end was worth the wait.

The film has music that belongs to the characters, and music that belongs to the film, to Jenkins’s choices, a reminder that the film is being carefully composed. (You can’t stop thinking how beautifully Jenkins’s black and brown cast photographs against the colors of Florida and his night walls; just as there is much to admire in every actor’s performance in the film.) But one song totally outside Black’s head is most important to the entire enterprise. After he has forgiven his mother, after we have seen Kevin smoking on a dreamy, slow-motion break at work, after Black has woken up to find that he has had a wet dream, at his age, about Kevin, he hits the open road.

We see his car from slightly above, on a straight highway that stretches into the distance. The music we hear is Caetano Veloso singing “Cucurrucucú Paloma,” an homage to love’s loss. The song has been recorded by several artists and been used in a number of films. But if a gay version exists, this is it. Veloso’s performance features in a film by Pedro Almodóvar, whose films about men in love with men were groundbreaking. It is exhilarating, sad as the song is meant to be, because in that moment Moonlight leaps free of genre.

It’s somewhat analogous to a problem that used to come up in black literature. For so long, the struggle was to be able to tell the truth about the black experience, and those writers who felt constrained by such a responsibility seemed to risk committing betrayal of some deep kind. On the other hand, remember the powerful messages offered by, say, Boyz n the Hood or La Haine concerning state-sponsored violence and survival. Maybe the theme of the black ghetto as cauldron of danger took over, like gangster rap seeming to push aside other styles of hip-hop. How we cheered gun-toting Omar in The Wire, because he was Robin Hood, righteous and gay.

Maybe that point has been made and a film can use the same elements to somewhat different purposes. It’s no surprise that Moonlight is being interpreted as an exploration of masculine identity, a questioning of whether traditional definitions of manhood are part of the trap for black men. But Black learned that in order to survive he had to be hard. He tells Kevin, still attractive, that he tried not to think about his early days and rebuilt himself from the ground up.

Kevin, like Black’s mother, expresses disapproval that he is still in the streets. As pleased as he is that scrawny Chiron has exploded into Trevante Rhodes, he is contemptuous of muscular Black’s gold “fronts,” ’hood-status mouth guards. Kevin is comfortable saying that he never was anything, never did anything he really wanted to do; he did what others expected of him. He has a terrible job, but he has his son and none of the worry of his bad days, and lives near the water, and feels he has a real life. He never really answers the question of why he called Black out of the blue after so many years, and neither can Black say when Kevin asks him why he just got on the highway and came all the way down there.

Moonlight isn’t saying that you can be sensitive and still a man, gay and still a man. It isn’t reassuring anyone about manhood. Black conformed; he and Kevin both did. Life offered them nothing else. Be hard or die. Meanwhile, they don’t lead double lives; they are not on the down low, hiding the fact that they have sex with men. They aren’t coming out; they are being themselves, or are on their way to becoming complete. They are each other’s escape, redemption. Just as the black struggle in the arts was to get the social truth in print, on the screen, on stage, so, too, for gay liberation the sexual openness counted. Though what will happen between Kevin and Black is not in doubt, the audience is not invited to the consummation. The camera lingers on them looking at each other in Kevin’s kitchen, then on Kevin cradling Black in the shadows. They look like they are in the remains of an embrace.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in order to show a black woman capable of romantic love. Black women had long been slandered and libeled in American popular culture as libidinous, close to the earth in their appetites, and therefore promiscuous. The white novelist Julia Peterkin won a Pulitizer Prize for a novel, Scarlet Sister Mary, in which the black heroine has eleven children by seven different men. Hurston wanted to say that her heroine was capable of emotional refinement, aware of her feelings, and precisely in those settings where black life was supposed to be animalistic, too basic for reflection on the self.

In a similar way, Moonlight bestows the capability of feeling romantic love onto a figure that has long been a symbol of predatory sexuality: the big, bad, black male. White fear of violent retribution on the part of the enslaved lies behind the stereotypes of black men as either beasts or clowns, studs who needed to be watched or eunuchs who could be trusted. Black confesses to Kevin that he is the only man who has ever touched him and he’s never really been with anyone. His chastity is the essence of the film’s romance.

The post Moon Over Miami appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Bob Silvers, my friend and the editor of The New York Review, died on March 20, shortly after completing the April 6 issue. Together with Barbara Epstein, Jason Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell, he founded the Review in 1963; for fifty-four years he was either co-editor with Barbara or, after her death in 2006, editor of the Review. Bob worked almost to the very end of his life, which would be no surprise to those who knew him well, including those who have written these brief memoirs.

—Rea Hederman

ELAINE BLAIR

Until I arrived at the Review as an editorial assistant, I had never met anyone who so rarely engaged in idle pleasantries as Bob. His daily language was pared down, accurate, and sincere. I found his example revelatory, and I would ponder his usage and elisions like a giddy college freshman. Bob would never, for instance, wish us a good weekend. Presumably he had no particular investment in the quality of our weekends, and possibly he didn’t even know when his assistants’ weekends were, since we took turns working Saturday and Sunday shifts with him.

But was he also, I wondered, rejecting the implied value of a good weekend? Is the goal of leisure time pleasure? Edification? Novel experience? If we couldn’t settle on criteria, we couldn’t possibly arrive at a valuation, in which case why bother asking on Monday morning how someone’s weekend had been? The rest of us walked around in a fever of sentimentality and superstition, it suddenly seemed to me, sloppily wishing each other good days and good trips and merriment at Christmas. But Bob said only as much as he meant. When I left the office after a night shift of taking dictation, sending out books, going over a manuscript with him, he said, “Thanks a lot!” And it felt like a lot.

Still, it was hard to get used to a professional relationship that was, by design, largely impersonal. There were four of us assistants and we were supposed to be nearly interchangeable extensions of Bob himself, the extra hands he needed to manage so big a job. Usually only Bob communicated directly with contributors, and when we worked on a manuscript he carefully went over every one of our suggestions or marginal notes. We rarely spoke to him about anything that wasn’t directly relevant to Review pieces. This too seemed to me tied up with Bob’s stringent rejection of linguistic and sentimental cliché, including the commonplaces of workplace relationships. Bob did not take us under his wing. He was not our mentor. He did not believe in us. These were impossibilities because the Review’s lexicon did not allow for them. They may not, in any case, be the best measures of a boss’s generosity.

I don’t remember exactly what Bob said when I gave him an essay I had written on spec and asked if he would consider it for the magazine, but I remember that the look on his face suggested that I’d ruined his afternoon. I’m sure that if I hadn’t worked in the office and had simply sent him the piece, he would have rejected it. But I was there, in person, so he gave the piece his attention and a few weeks later handed me something of rare value: an unsparingly marked-up text.

IAN BURUMA

My first communication from Bob arrived by telex in Hong Kong, I think sometime in 1984. It read simply: “When can we expect Keene?” On a visit to New York, I had foolishly blurted out the idea of writing about Donald Keene’s enormous two-volume opus on modern Japanese literature, about which my knowledge was not nearly sufficient to write a serious essay.

But my fit of bluff in Bob’s office had piqued his interest. He had wanted something on Japan. The piece was deemed adequate enough for publication (“very fresh” might have been his scribbled note of encouragement). After that it was “on we go, old boy,” his usual phrase as soon as another piece had been printed. And what a journey it has been.

My life as a writer owes everything to Bob’s editorship. He had too much respect for writers he trusted to wish to change their individual styles. In this respect he was quite different from many editors, especially in the US, who see the words delivered by their contributors as raw material to, as one distinguished editor once put it to me, as though I should be grateful, “get [his] teeth into.”

Bob’s teeth marks never showed. But he had an infallible eye for loose thinking. His brilliance lay in his sense of clarity. He made you think harder. There was no room in his “paper” for fuzziness or vague abstractions. He wanted examples, descriptions, and concrete thoughts. And because he was the ideal reader you most wanted to please, you gradually learned how to express yourself better.

Some people liked to mock Bob’s mid-Atlantic drawl, which owed something to Oxford High Table talk, Plimptonian (as in George) classiness, and Long Island lockjaw. But this was not a mere affectation. Bob was that rare person: an American who loved France as dearly as he loved England, if not more so. The University of Chicago, the Sorbonne, and the best of liberal Oxford philosophers shaped his intellectual life. His clarity came from French thinking as well as Anglo-Saxon empiricism. But he remained deeply committed to the country of his birth. And I don’t just mean the Metropolitan Opera or the Ivy League schools. One of his fondest memories, which he would rehearse when he felt most relaxed, was to have been the only white soldier in an all-black military unit being trained somewhere in the American Deep South.

To me, Bob represented the best of a civilization that was rooted in the Enlightenment. But part of that liberal humanist tradition is openness to other civilizations, hence Bob’s thirst for knowledge about China, Japan, the Middle East, or indeed anywhere that was of interest.

Susan Sontag’s definition of an intellectual as someone who is interested in everything is perhaps an exaggeration. No one can be equally interested in everything, but Bob came damned close.

The idea of civilization that Bob personified is now under siege, not least in the countries that he was most closely associated with. We have lost him just when he was most needed. Our tribute must be to defend what he stood for. On we go. We owe it to him.

DAVID COLE

The package came unannounced, via Federal Express, with two books and a handwritten note: “We wondered if you’d be interested in reviewing these books for us. Bob.” That was thirteen years ago. I’ve been contributing frequently to The New York Review of Books ever since. And that means every word I’ve written—on legal subjects spanning terrorism, crime, gay rights, affirmative action, freedom of speech and religion, and the laws of war—has been handled with exquisite care, obsessive attention, and quiet grace by Bob Silvers. I’ve spent my life teaching and litigating these issues; Bob, who went to three semesters of law school in the late 1940s before deciding he wanted to be an editor, understood them as well as or better than I did.

But that was the least of it. Bob did the same with every article in every issue—on subjects as diverse as opera, history, poetry, education, contemporary politics, jazz, psychology, television, religion, film, medicine, the environment, art, fiction, and drama. From 1963 until 2006, he shared the responsibilities with Barbara Epstein. When she died, Bob never replaced her; he just added her writers to his plate.

To attend to every article in even a single issue of the Review would be a stunning achievement. Bob did it for decades (with help from a small group of extremely talented, devoted, and self-effacing editorial assistants and senior editors). If my experience is any guide, each article went through as many as five or six rounds. What this prodigious production meant was that, even in his seventies and eighties, Bob practically lived at the Review. He was seventy-four when I began working with him. He’d call with an urgent and always perceptive thought about a piece, usually at an inconvenient hour; I always took the call. I’m a morning person, but I had many conversations with him well after 11:00 PM on a weekend evening—from his office.

If Bob was willing to work around the clock on every piece he published, how could I say no to a phone call at an odd hour? He’d inevitably raise a question I hadn’t considered or had thought I could finesse. “Well, I just think the reader will want to know…,” he’d say. And he was always right. When the conversation was done, Bob would just hang up. Never a good-bye. The first five or six times, the abruptness took me aback, so out of keeping with his gentle manners and grace in every other respect. But one soon learned that it was nothing personal; he was just too busy. On to the next galley.

Bob was a consummate generalist, conversant in virtually all fields. He eschewed jargon and the language of specialists, and pushed his writers to say things as simply and clearly as possible, without in any way reducing the sophistication of the thought. Most of his writers had spent decades toiling away in the depths of their fields; Bob ensured that we communicated in ways that those not so steeped would understand. He was a master at the art of translation.

Bob was celebrated, justly, for the publication he fashioned. He received many honorary degrees and awards, including the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2013—a man the Review did not hesitate to criticize. But he never seemed to care much about the accolades; to Bob, they were almost a distraction from the work. The only reward he really seemed to prize was the appearance, every two weeks, of the “paper” itself. The New York Review will go on; it will be Bob’s legacy. A week before he died, even as he was confined to his apartment, he e-mailed me with an idea for a new piece. Fittingly, I suppose, he went out without a good-bye, working on the next galley.

MARK DANNER

I began working for Bob Silvers in September 1981, when I was twenty-two and fresh out of college. I was one of three assistants, informally known to contributors as elves and—to us—as slaves. Because of Bob’s astonishing appetite for work, New York Review assistants had two shifts, nine to five and two to ten. I quickly came to prefer the late shift, though this meant in practice that one often worked until eleven or twelve or even later.

The workspace was what is customarily referred to as Dickensian: towering piles of books on his large desk and our much smaller ones, which had a disconcerting habit of toppling over catastrophically at inopportune moments, heaps of manuscripts everywhere, clouds of cigarillo smoke. (Bob at that time was a chain smoker.) As an assistant I would sit behind my small piles of books, place his endless stream of phone calls to writers (“Can you hold for Robert Silvers?”), and listen for the sound of a manuscript or a book or a set of galleys landing in Bob’s outbox. Galleys—this was pre-Internet—had to be sent off by mail, FedEx, or carrier pigeon to wherever in the world the writer was hiding.

Heavily edited manuscripts had to be retyped: a delight for me because it meant deciphering Bob’s handwriting and marveling at the way he transmuted dross into gold, with nary a trace of his own voice trespassing into the piece. He was an arch ventriloquist, able to adopt the tone of any given writer: the artist as editor. The editor as artist. Manuscripts would be worked on, sometimes extensively, retyped, then set in galleys and mailed off to Berkeley, Chicago, Lucca, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge. Even on pieces he had largely rewritten, Bob would scrawl his typical note: “Dear So and So, Great thanks for your strong piece. You’ll see we have made a few small suggestions. Please let’s have changes soon. Best, Bob.” I would marvel that the authors of pieces that had been substantially rewritten would often call and profess themselves astonished that “Bob hasn’t changed a thing!”

During those long evenings Bob had a way of sensing when you were getting ready, however surreptitiously, to slip out the door. He would begin piling material into the outbox: letters to post, galleys to send, books to mail, manuscripts to type. The hours would pass: eleven, midnight, one AM. Again and again the assistant struggling to leave would be forced to shrug off his or her coat and sit back down at the typewriter. Bob fought against being alone—for he knew that soon he inevitably would be.

If one stayed late enough there was a special bonus: at a certain moment he would leap up from his chair and charge into the publisher’s office next door, and in a few minutes one would hear this somewhat gruff and imperious boss chuckling and joking and mumbling endearments. He was calling his lady love, who was just then rising in Lausanne. The sound of his voice at these moments—animated and happy, distracted for once from the piles of manuscripts and the towers of books—was enough to make up for the late hour and the terrors of the brimming outbox. He taught me, beyond editing and writing and so much else, the necessity of devotion.

JOAN DIDION

When I heard that Bob had died, I felt that the bottom had dropped out of my world. I was unprepared for it. I should have been prepared, but I wasn’t, because it seemed impossible. People like Bob don’t die; we need them too much.

Bob always shaped how I thought. I had no opinion I did not run by him first. “New York: Sentimental Journeys” (1991), on the Central Park jogger case, was far and away the hardest piece I ever worked on for this reason. Bob from the beginning knew what the piece had to be—he knew before I did—and he pushed me until I got it there. He knew exactly how dangerous the subject was, and his reaction to this danger was to make it more dangerous. His idea from the first was to get it right, to make it perfect, regardless of whatever negative reaction it might elicit in the city at that moment. When I first turned it in to him, it was clearly too long. His solution was to insist I go further. This meant making it longer. If that piece succeeds at all, it succeeds because he gave me permission to finish it.

I loved having dinner with him. We would go to the Knickerbocker Club on 62nd Street and eat Dover sole and sautéed vegetables and talk about what we needed from each other. From me, he needed a willingness to work, and from him, I needed work to do. He understood this as the fair exchange that it was.

After my husband John died, when my daughter Quintana was very sick, Bob grasped my situation, and blessedly kept me writing—on the Bush administration, on euthanasia. He intuited that I would either work or I would die. He was among the few who understood this.

I knew in 1973 how important he was to my work. I didn’t know how important he was to me personally until much later. In the last few years, our friendship was closer than it had ever been, and I thought about him every day. I wished I could have seen him more, but I knew he needed to keep working.

An editorial note from Bob would open up new possibilities both in a piece and in life itself. What could have been an empty place suddenly flooded with light and understanding.

I will always need Bob.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

It was my great and improbable good fortune to work for Bob in two capacities—once as his assistant in around 1973, and decades later as a contributor. One could say I hardly knew him, yet these experiences and the line between them are etched about as deeply as any marks in the person I feel to be myself.

Having several assistants at a time was indispensable to Bob. Tensions ran high and spilled over largely on us, so through the years Bob inevitably had many assistants, of whom I was almost certainly the worst.

I remember magic personalities orbiting the office, electric excitement and glamour. People who encountered Bob only in his later years might be surprised to learn that when my boyfriend first met him, he said, “But he makes Cary Grant look like a knobbly old turnip!” What I don’t remember is what we assistants actually did, other than wade despairingly through a loam of books, papers, and cigarette ash, and rush off to the post office at all hours.

My first day, Bob asked me to take a letter. After what seemed many hours of rhetorical sublimity declaimed in his startlingly patrician accent, Bob said, “All right, read it back, please, uh…”(What was my name?)

I was clutching pages of incomprehensible scrawl. “Gosh,” I said, “that’s the hard part, Bob.”

One’s hair really can stand on end, I learned in the frozen silence. Bob produced a brief, grim chuckle. “That’s the hard part, Bob. That’s the hard part, Bob…” he echoed, apparently in sheer incredulity.

Bob was severe, Bob was exacting, Bob was irascible—oh, why did he not fire me that day, or on any of the following days, during which I demonstrated equal incompetence, often sobbing? To escape I had to quit.

Many years passed. I was out of town, but a large package found me, bearing the familiar return address. Not possible, not possible…I quaked for a few days before opening it to find a book by a favorite writer of mine, Péter Nádas.

I wrote to Bob, saying that I was overextended as it was, and explaining the many reasons I was unqualified to write about the book. Bob wrote back immediately—countering, with immense charm, each of my points.

He remembered my name now! That note, plus irrepressible vanity on my part, equaled the French Horn of Destiny.

Well, that was the only book ever written that could tempt me to write a review, I thought—until a second one arrived, and the process was repeated, almost exactly.

It seems that Bob had an uncanny, almost diabolical, insight into what book would be irresistible to whom. But also irresistible, it turned out, was the prospect of working on another piece for him. His inexhaustible appetite for exploring the wide world was alloyed with a fastidiousness regarding detail. He attuned himself astonishingly to one’s purposes, and his delight in a finished piece was thrilling.

One feels profound gratitude to someone who wants one to accomplish something that’s apparently beyond one’s reach and who makes it possible to do so. And Bob’s conviction that the smallest elements of expression are the foundation of rigorous thought—that rigorous thought lights up the world—permeated the magazine, issue after issue. The world is in crisis; the loss of such intellectual finesse, curiosity, and force, of such wide-ranging vigilance, is a crisis on its own.

JASON EPSTEIN

When Elizabeth Hardwick, her husband Robert Lowell, Barbara, and I conceived what would become The New York Review of Books during the newspaper strike of 1962–1963, we knew that our dear friend Bob was the only possible editor. Bob, then a brilliant young Harper’s editor, had recently commissioned Lizzie to write an essay on the decline of serious criticism in America, in which she savaged the dismal Sunday book reviews for their “flat praise and the faint dissension, the minimal style and the light little article, the absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity—the lack, at last, of the literary tone itself.”

It was with Lizzie’s Harper’s article in mind that the four of us saw the opportunity wordlessly presented by the strike: either create the kind of review that she had envisioned or forever stop complaining. There was no middle ground, no escape, and therefore no discussion. The opportunity—indeed the obligation—had arrived of its own volition. There was no ignoring it. Bob was born to edit the review that Lizzie’s piece demanded. I called him the following day and, to our delight, he immediately accepted. He then called Barbara and asked her to be his co-editor.

That all this came together seems in retrospect to have been a miracle. The first issue achieved just the quality of gravitas and fluency we hoped for. No reader could fail to see the point of our project. What we could not have imagined at the time was the utter greatness of Bob’s achievement over fifty-four years, and the kindness and fairness that accompanied his profound wisdom. Bob was a man for the ages.

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH

We are just sitting down to Christmas lunch in London when the telephone rings: “It’s Bob. We have a dangling modifier on galley D4.” FedEx packages appeared at the remotest croft, island refuge, or East European enclave. The New York Review would always get through.

Bob Silvers was the greatest editor I have ever worked with, and part of his secret was in that D4. First there was a package, usually containing the proof copy of a book and, folded inside it, the unmistakable double-spaced typewritten letter with its famous “we hope that something might be done.” (I remember Zoë Heller joking that she would try this courtly formula when asking her children to tidy their rooms: “We hope that something might be done.”) You could not plead other commitments, because he would give you all the time you needed. There followed more packages, faxes, and e-mails, full of supporting material. When you sent him the article, on which you had sometimes worked for months, you would receive a swift response, usually containing the locution “great thanks,” and a small selection from his personal sushi tray of adjectives to describe the piece (“strong,” “important”).

But then came the marked-up text, with his characteristic scrawl on the margins of galley proofs. His essential questions were also the simplest: What do you mean? What do you really want to say? These comments were written on successive galley proofs—D4 meaning the fourth page of the fourth or D set of galleys. Loving this attritional improvement, I once got to an F galley.

In my mind’s eye, I see Bob forever picking up, perusing, and then casting aside a set of galleys. That casting aside was important, because when he came back to the D galley for the nth time, he would see something afresh. Along the way, there were wonderful long telephone conversations, drawing on his extraordinary range of knowledge and reference. I look back through the online list of my contributions over thirty-three years, and I can remember our long-distance exchanges on almost every one.

I think too of our many meetings, in Budapest, Oslo, Paris, or London, dinners in the New York apartment, lunches in the Japanese restaurant below the office: Bob always in his dark blue suit, alight with geniality, laughter, enthusiasm, and a glint of quiet steeliness. Yet even at the height of his reputation and powers, he also had an endearing touch of vulnerability.

He was never earnest but always serious. His support for dissident intellectuals everywhere was steadfast: Václav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, Nadine Gordimer, Fang Lizhi, to name but a few. Shaped by his experience in Paris during the early years of the cold war, Bob represented the values of the transatlantic West at its best. His was a self-confident but also a self-critical liberalism. The more the Review criticized the dark sides of American policy (in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, and elsewhere), the more it enhanced American soft power. Despite several brave attempts, no one has ever made a successful pan-European literary review, and so The New York Review remains the nearest thing we Europeans have to one—a common intellectual reference point from Lisbon to Tallin, and from Athens to Edinburgh.

When I wrote about fifty years of The New York Review in these pages in 2013, I reflected on how this liberal, transatlantic West was already under challenge from many sides. There is bitter irony in the fact that Bob has died just as an antiliberal counterrevolution, already manifest in Moscow, Beijing, Istanbul, and Budapest, is threatening the three Western heartlands he knew and loved best: Britain, with Brexit, France, with the rise of Marine Le Pen, and the United States, with you-know-who. We need his spirit more than ever, and we shall keep its flame burning.

ALMA GUILLERMOPRIETO

When in 1998 John Paul II became the first pope to visit Cuba, Bob immediately agreed that I should go. Of course there was never any money for travel, but he scraped something together. I joined a cheap package tour of Catholic pilgrims at a travel agency in Mexico and happily wrote two stories from that trip: one about the pope’s visit and a later one about Fidel Castro, whose infirmities were just beginning to show (although he would hold on to power for another ten years).

Even as we were closing the pope story Bob was on the phone about another one. Shouldn’t I be doing something about human rights on the island? My back stiffened. I dislike categories in general because they narrow down reality, and “human rights,” I said, was one that in Cuba led readers and writers right back to a useless cold war understanding of a Latin American country.

Bob was having none of that. How could we run two stories on a country that had lived under the systematic repression of thought and expression for decades, and not mention it? I grumbled and fought; the summer heat was approaching, I had no sources, a rumor was going about that everyone’s go-to human rights victim was now suspect, and, ultimately, I hated the very idea. Not knowing of Bob’s ties to that institution, I said the whole thing sounded like something worthy of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Well, dearie, Bob said (dearie, unlike kiddo, was in Bobspeak a term not of affection but of annoyance), one’s thoughts go back to those poor men, the writers and the thinkers and those who simply wish to remain apart, held in dark, dank cells for years and years. One’s thoughts go back and linger there with them, and one can’t help wondering, is there something to be done? Are we not obliged to address their situation in some small way?

The argument went on for days. The pope story ran, the Fidel story went into galleys, and Bob wouldn’t give up. In the end, it became a question of being unspeakably rude to him or saying yes, and so I went and reported and wrote the story I should have volunteered for in the first place. Indeed, the situation of dozens of men (men only, at that point) held in prison on absurd charges, in obscene conditions, was intolerable. I was embarrassed for myself and both appalled and fascinated by what I saw. How could we not address, in some small way, the situation of people laboring under such injustice? Bob made his writers better writers by pushing them to think better.

SUE HALPERN

Nine days before she died, I turned in my last piece for Barbara Epstein, which, as one of “Barbara’s writers,” I assumed would be my last for The New York Review. I knew there was little chance she would read it, and even less chance it would be published, but it felt imperative to see through that final collaboration, ignoring the reality at hand and offering up a little normalcy. For months she edited manuscripts while hooked up to the chemo machine, so I could also imagine her, pen in hand, wrestling with words till the very end.

A few weeks later, the phone rang. It was Robert Silvers. “We’ll be sending galleys of your [fill in the blank with an adjective of high praise] article soon.” We talked briefly about the piece, and at length about Barbara, whom we both loved dearly. “What would you like to do next?” Bob asked before we hung up. And with that, I was one of “Bob’s writers,” too.

Packages of books began to arrive unbidden. Tucked inside would be a brief, telegraphic message, something on the order of “see what you can do.” I confess that I was not always happy to find these leaning up against the front door, and I would give them a wide berth for days, knowing that once I tore open the FedEx envelope, I’d be working like mad to master the subject at hand. But I also knew that before long Bob would be calling to wonder if I’d gotten those books, and when I might have something for him. He was wily like that.

I loved talking with Bob. On the phone, for sure, when I could always count on him to leave me with some insight or something to think about, but even more sitting knee-to-knee on the office couch, where somehow, always, we would make each other laugh. The truest thing I know about Bob was expressed in that sound: his delight in the world. If I had to pick a single word to describe him, it would not be brilliant, or driven, or perspicacious, or courtly, or generous, or honest, or curious, or kind, or polymathic, or good—all of which apply—it would be “delighted.” Just look at his eyes in any picture and there it is.

A while ago, a writer with a number of best sellers to her name got in touch after getting her first Review assignment, to ask what she needed to know in order to write for Bob. I was stymied at first, and then realized why: one didn’t write for Bob. One wrote for oneself, and for the reader, and Bob was there to ensure that—to paraphrase (and contradict) T.S. Eliot—every raid on the inarticulate did not end in the general mess of imprecision of feeling. His goal was not to insert himself and his point of view into a piece, but rather to enable the writer to make an argument with clarity and disposition. He trusted his writers to say what they needed to say and they, in turn, trusted him to help them do so. He knew their capacities. Sometimes he knew them better than they did themselves.

“All right, kiddo,” he said, signing off, the last time we spoke. In that conversation he happened to mention that the medications he’d been taking were not working. Honestly, he seemed more concerned about Trump’s immigration policy. He suggested, in his offhand way, that I might read a certain article in Foreign Policy. It was something to think about. So I did.

JENNIFER HOMANS

I always thought of Bob as a brilliant man, all mind. This could be disconcerting, and there was a moment when I thought of him as strangely impersonal and detached. It was 2008 and my late husband Tony Judt had just been diagnosed with ALS and had written to Bob explaining his dire situation. Tony had been writing for Bob for nearly two decades. Before Bob, Tony had been an accomplished historian of Europe. Almost immediately though, Bob pushed him to expand his range and began sending him books on American foreign policy, Primo Levi, Jean Genet, Israel-Palestine, and, later, the Bush years, the Iraq war, and more. He pushed Tony’s writing too. Pre-Bob the writing was academic; post-Bob, there was a sea change and Tony’s prose became lighter, clearer, “strong,” as Bob liked to say.

Bob had become a constant presence in our lives. Which is why I was so shocked when he responded to Tony’s helpless note with a few breezy lines: We’ll be in touch soon! Weeks passed. Then he came for a visit. Tony was feeling low that day, sitting wan and pale in the back room in his corner chair. I felt like I had been living with Bob for years, but in fact he had never been to our apartment. He wafted cheerfully into the room in his suit and scarf, bringing the news of the world with him. After some very British-sounding abstractions about how tough life could be, they immediately switched to politics, and I remember Tony struggling to keep up or care. He was just too sick. It seemed an impossible situation, these two men, all mind, one rapidly losing his body, and neither knowing quite what to say.

What happened next changed my view of Bob, but also of Tony. By then, Tony was quadriplegic and on a breathing machine, writing only with the help of an assistant or whoever was there to be his hands at the keyboard. He started composing pieces at night in his head and reciting them in the morning. He sent one to Bob, who immediately published it. They were back in touch. There would be a series, it was a project, and Bob was right there. But these were not the usual pieces on books and politics; they were deeply personal reflections and memories. Soon after, Bob told me the essays made him think of Central European writers and a memoir form he hadn’t seen for some time. He and Tony had found a common language.

When Bob turned eighty in 2009, Tony composed a note, knowing he would die soon:

More seriously, and I know that I have to stand in line to say this, you will always be an extraordinary editor—by far the best I have ever known and, it seems fair to assert, by far the best there is. You surely do not need me to tell you about the place that the NYR holds in the hearts and minds (sorry!) of hundreds of thousands of readers from Berkeley to Beijing. And, of course, above all, you are a legend in your own time zone. It is a pleasure and an honour to work with you and I look forward to many more conversations and galleys….

Affectionately,
Tony

Bob wrote back with his preternatural restraint:

I just read your words here and wanted to tell you how much they meant to me. Every good thing to you both.

My best,
Bob

Tony forwarded me the response with a brief message:

I think this is the closest I have ever seen Bob get to being moved. I am so pleased I wrote it. Love, T

When Tony died, Bob was still there. Upon the publication of Thinking the Twentieth Century, Tony’s last book, written with Tim Snyder, I called Bob: I don’t know if I can do it, but will you help me if I write something? He said yes, please try. When he received my text, Bob focused on certain emotional words, encouraging me to rein in the feeling, take out the fleshy excess, leave only the bones. I fought for the flesh but he called again and again, telling me how much stronger it would be if understated. I was still in grief: it felt horrible, let it be horrible. But he was looking for a kind of poise. Distance and reflection, even in the face of disaster.

Bob had a classical mind, I think. Disciplined, spare, all emotion distilled. In late December when his partner Grace died, I wrote him a note of condolence. He had always said that she was “marvelous,” “quite a gal,” and she was often tucked somewhere into his notes about the work: “I’m in Switzerland with Grace.” “Grace sends love.” When he got my note, he wrote back as he did to so many with a rare show of raw emotion: “I am nowhere without Grace.” It is often said that people die the way they live, and his death made him come clear in my mind. He died with the woman he loved. Without her he was nowhere. It was poetic, understated, a life well lived. His absence is difficult to accept. He was always there and now he is not.

MARK LILLA

We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of soul.

—Robert Musil

It’s a romantic dogma, rooted in God knows what gnostic heresy, that the world is divided into those who think and those who feel. The Mirror and the Lamp, the Dynamo and the Virgin. And that this is how it should be. Tell a romantic you understand him and you have pronounced a death sentence. It means his wings have been clipped and his soul has begun its descent. Oh, Lord, please let me be misunderstood. What keeps him airborne is the conviction that those are philistines pounding the pavement below.

Countless little magazines and literary reviews have been conceived as a refuge from the crowd, a perch for Icarus. The New York Review was meant to be different. Frustrated by the lazy gentility of American book reviewing and its detachment from wider intellectual and cultural currents, the editors invented a genre for what they hoped would be a new audience. The digressive review-essay style that became the paper’s trademark presumed that a writer could bring intellect to matters of soul without violating either, and that there was an audience for such writing. From the start, the Review was a democratic, pedagogical project.

This I knew when I began writing for Bob Silvers back in the 1990s. What I didn’t know was that the pedagogy was intended for the author as well. Bob was a teacher, one of the greatest I have ever encountered. Many stories have been told of his legendary interventionism—the late-night calls about an obscure sentence, the flood of packages, faxes, and later e-mails with suggested reading, not always to the point but welcome as signs of his enthusiasm. Profiles by journalists could make him appear an endearing fussbudget. But nothing I have read asks the only pertinent question: Why did he take the trouble? Why bother? After all, people now consume so much “content,” so fast, that they don’t notice. Errors in print can be fixed online instantaneously. And besides, we’re all publishers now, so who needs a superego?

What the journalists missed, but his writers knew, is that the process of endless refinement was the point. Bob at work on a manuscript resembled nothing so much as a Jesuit spiritual adviser, minus the collar, helping the novice refine his raw inner awareness. It was a vocation, in the strict sense, an expression of magnanimity. He was determined to see that a book got the appreciation and criticism it deserved. But even more, it seemed to me, he wanted the writer to understand himself better than he already did. You say this, and you’re on to something, but what does it really mean? What are you trying to say? Bob had a profound abhorrence of vagueness. It was the cardinal sin because it was cowardly, a self-evasion. More than once I wanted to tear the hairshirt off. Icarus, c’est moi. He never permitted it because he was more loyal to me than I was to myself.

In reading the Review, you always learn something. In writing for Bob, you became something. It was a gift none of us really deserved. But what gift ever is? That’s what makes it a gift.

JANET MALCOLM

“What are you working on?”
“I’m writing a piece for Bob.”

This exchange, often heard around the city, will be heard no more. Now we will have to write for an imaginary Bob—though on some level we were always writing for an imaginary Bob. He was our literary conscience. He was the figure looking over our shoulders as we wrote, holding us to a rare standard. When you wrote “for Bob” you felt the pressure of a demand to be interesting. You do not bore a genius. You do as good an impersonation as you can of someone worthy of his attention.

The imaginary Bob appealed to the better parts of our writing natures, to our capacity for audacity and unpredictability; and, of course, he couldn’t always rouse them. But the best pieces in the magazine had a shimmer that came from outside of themselves. As one read them a sense of Bob came into the room.

His actual interventions in the manuscripts I submitted usually had to do with questions of fact. He wanted to know more about something, or he wanted something added that he knew should be there. He was after the truth of things, which begins with the facts of things. He seemed to know more facts than anyone else in the world did and to understand their power. In today’s new order of untruthfulness (do you remember the good old order of mere truthiness?) his legacy has a moral significance beyond description.

FINTAN O’TOOLE

The great editor is a chimerical creature, combining contrary qualities in one mind: assertive and self-effacing, commanding and sensitive, infinitely curious and sharply focused, patient and fearfully demanding, wide-angle and close-up. Robert Silvers was the greatest editor of our time because he managed these contradictions with a seemingly effortless elegance. He was able, somehow, to show his writers only the gentler sides—the civility, the patience, the infinite care for the smallest details of an essay. Their other sides—the unbending standards of excellence, the phenomenal drive, the larger mission of which your own piece was but a tiny part—were never explicitly expressed. They did not have to be: writers—and more importantly readers—could never miss the force of their steadfast presence.

The thing that everyone privileged enough to write for Robert Silvers will remember is the mystery of the Federal Express packet of books that would arrive every so often. Mysterious because you had no idea what you were going to get. Sometimes it would be stuff that you more or less knew about; sometimes not. Bob did not believe in comfort zones. In any other editor this might have been eccentric, even perverse. But with Bob it was a deeply serious act of faith. He believed that there is such a thing as the general reader, that public life depends on the existence of a common space in which ideas can be shared, absorbed, mulled over, kicked around. And if there is the general reader, there must also be the general writer. If you were lucky enough to write for The New York Review, you had to be prepared to share what you knew or thought without arrogance or condescension. Sometimes you had to go further and share what you didn’t know until Bob’s quiet demands sent you off to learn it.

What he was doing in this was holding a crucial middle ground. He understood better than anyone else that the public realm has to fight for its existence against two equally great dangers. One is the culture of self-enclosed, technocratic expertise, the hiving off of intellectual life into increasingly minute specializations and increasingly impenetrable professional dialects. The other is the insistence—so much in the ascendant now—that there is no expertise at all, that scholarship and rigor and evidence are the mere playthings of elitist eggheads. Bob’s great gift to civic life was the living demonstration in every issue of the Review that these impostors could be treated with equal—and magnificent—contempt. He held open the space for that great republican virtue: common curiosity. He made this fierce effort seem so natural that it is only in his absence that we realize how hard it is to do and how much it counts.

I always come back in thinking about Bob to his imperturbable courtesy. His good manners were not mere mannerisms. They said something. They were a constant reminder to the rest of us that we owed readers the same consideration—to think things through as best we could, to avoid shortcuts and lazy assumptions, to write as well as we could manage. And to remember that it all matters, that the life of a great journal is part of the life of democracy itself. We know better than we have ever known how boorishness and vulgarity pollute public life. Robert Silvers showed us better than any other editor how courtesy and care sustain it.

DARRYL PINCKNEY

For the longest time I called him Mr. Silvers. A couple of Elizabeth Hardwick’s other former students were his editorial assistants and I hung around the office while still an undergraduate. After college, I got temporary work in the mailroom of the Review. Then one day a parcel arrived at my apartment, a book and a letter from Robert Silvers. Maybe he used that phrase—to see what can be done. I’d never had a conversation of any kind with him before. I’d been introduced, but after that he lived in his own world in the office. Barbara Epstein in those early years wouldn’t talk to me any more than she had to. When it came time to discuss the piece, he was pleasant, talked easily of Jimmy Baldwin, and knew more about my subject than I expected him to. Professor Hardwick—not yet Lizzie to me—had been through the piece before I walked it in, so there was not too much of a painful nature left to say.

I’d sat down scared out of my head and I stood up still scared stupid and down through the next forty years I never, I mean never, got over being scared of him. James Fenton, my partner, could talk with him at length, but in a social setting, I had to let him turn away after two minutes or so. Mr. Silvers, back when, had among his assistants a smart, poised girl who was sometimes absent for elegant reasons. I became her substitute and so spent some hours with him, listening to him talk to others. One New Year’s Eve about nine o’clock I asked him if it would be OK if I went off. He said yes, but it would also be OK if I wanted to stay.

I also remember his tyranny in the office. It was tiresome for Barbara, because she grew up with a father who yelled. I’d gone from Mr. Silvers’s office to the typesetting studio to sitting outside Barbara’s office door and the hardest thing about being her assistant was learning, firstly, that you could not protect her from him, and, secondly, that she didn’t need anyone’s protection. Their battles were over a writer’s argument, a writer’s prose. The Review’s style emerged from Bob and Barbara’s clashes that, looking back, obscured how similar in sensibility they actually were. For me, it was part of the emotional chaos and intellectual thrill of the place. A cool friend who also worked at the Review had to warn me to chill the Review snob act a bit when we were hanging out downtown. The best thing about the Review was some of the people in the office, the friends you made, young writers whose work you fell for. And, yes, there was the education you got or made up for just by reading it.

There’s the first word and then there’s the last word, but even Edmund Wilson was dumb once, Lizzie said. Bob and Grace really loved her, and that was my bond with Bob, love for Elizabeth Hardwick and her love for The New York Review of Books, which, she said more than once, had saved her life.

YASMINE EL RASHIDI

When Bob took an interest in my world, he quite literally opened the world to me. Our relationship began with the Egyptian uprising of 2011, and in a conversation over those initial weeks that extended across months, into years, I lived and thought through with him the most profound experience of my life.

Bob gave me a sense of value as a writer—in the attention he offered, and in the trust. When he asked if something might be done about the Egyptian presidential election, he delighted in a piece that instead examined the particularities of the Egyptian bureaucracy. He sent clips, books, letters, offering you things to think about—consider—but in the end, he was genuinely interested in what as a writer you came back with, in content, voice, form. The Review quickly became my writing home, and Bob my measure, my guide. There was no other reader. He was the one who mattered most.

Bob cared about his writers—not just the legendary ones. He cared about our well-being, our safety, even our personal lives. After sharing an experience I had with Egyptian security that particularly rattled me, his concern grew, and he often called to ask if I felt safe, if I needed anything. He suggested ways I might tell the story, even perhaps “a short story” for the “paper” instead.

He stood by us, too. One of my last pieces for him, about the violent clashes between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood that followed the fall of President Mohamed Morsi’s government in the summer of 2013, generated an avalanche of controversy. Bob had pushed, respectfully, through a rigorous process of checking facts and statements to verify the position my reporting had led me to take—one that ran contrary to that of almost every major international news organization—and once the piece had gone to press, he was unflinching in his support. I heard of the critical and questioning letters from others, never him. He only ever thanked me for writing it.

Bob always seemed immensely pleased to see you. He made you feel as if there was nothing more thrilling—marvelous—in that moment than your company. He had an energy, enthusiasm, and buoyancy that were infectious, and he was magnanimous in every way. When I suggested that I might need some time away from Cairo, he did everything to support and make that possible, helping my passage to New York. And when I shared with him my struggle to write a nonfiction book on Egypt, he gently prodded, asking questions to coax out of me thoughts on the story I wanted to tell. He was the first to suggest that fiction might be the form for me. This was a measure of his openness—his understanding and care and sense of his writers beyond the scope of what was considered their realm; it was also part of why and how he came to be their friend as well.

Over the past two and a half years, as I worked on a piece for him from and about Cairo, we had lunches and exchanged e-mails and letters and occasionally the phone would ring. I walked the streets of my city thinking about everything with him in mind. He seemed unwavering in his patience and encouragement, still completely engaged and enthusiastic about the project twenty-eight months later. A couple of months before he died, in a letter about a novel he was sending me for review, he added a postscript about my “Notes”—as we had tentatively entitled the piece—suggesting that it “need not be conclusive.” In his absence, I feel a void, a sense of disorientation, the knowledge that my “Notes” will never, without his eyes, feel either conclusive or complete.

NATHANIEL RICH

Sharpening pencils, fetching dry cleaning, taking dictation, dodging sharpened pencils thrown at your head—life as Bob’s editorial assistant was unglamorous and often had little to do with editing. It took time to win his trust. As a new assistant, weeks removed from college graduation, I longed for an editorial assignment, the ultimate test of a staffer’s mettle. Bob only handed over essays that he had grown sick of trying to wrestle into coherence. These forsaken manuscripts sat on a corner of his desk, often buried under books, languishing for months if not years—the pariahs of the editorial roster. Bob rarely gave up on them but the presence of this pile was a constant affront, a black mark on an otherwise undefeated record.

My moment finally arrived several months into the job, when he lifted a manuscript from the pariah pile and called my name—itself a minor milestone in an assistant’s life, the direct address. My excitement curdled to dread when I saw the piece: a British lord’s assessment of a Nobel laureate’s monograph about economic modeling. I could not imagine an essay I was less suited to work on. I had defiantly avoided taking a single economics course in college and could not begin to understand any of the technical words the author used, let alone his argument. Ashamed, I admitted as much to Bob.

“Nonsense!” he said.

He explained that my ignorance of the subject, on the contrary, made me an ideal reader for the piece. He leapt from his chair and scanned the shelves behind his desk, where he kept his reference books. Down tumbled The Penguin Dictionary of Economics, Barron’s Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms, An Encyclopedia of Keynesian Economics, and a half-dozen other volumes, landing with thuds on his desk. All the definitions I needed could be found in these books, he said, before launching into a brief lecture on growth theory. My job, he explained, was to translate the piece into language that even a person as ignorant of economic theory as I was could understand.

This was my introduction to one of the central tenets of Bob’s editorial philosophy. Good writing is capable of bringing to life even the most arcane subjects. Big ideas demand vivid prose. Academic jargon is fatal, as are stock expressions, terms of art, empty metaphors. Dead language not only obscures the ideas it means to describe. It blocks original thinking. Many writers will say that Bob brought out their best prose. He did more than that. He brought out their highest thoughts.

Clarity of prose leads to clarity of mind. And without clarity of mind, moral clarity is impossible. I forgot what Bob taught me about economics but I’ll never forget that.

INGRID D. ROWLAND

After any phone conversation, Bob Silvers hung up with a distinctive, resonant klunk—he was done, he was satisfied, and it was time to get back to work. He called The New York Review “our little paper.” His was certainly an editorial “we”—and who, among editors, had more right to that regal pronoun?—but more importantly, that “we” reflected his sense that the paper truly belonged to all of us: readers, writers, editors, printers, publishers, the people who run newsstands in Athens and Rome and all the other surprising corners of the world where The New York Review has become part of life. Pondered quietly, hotly argued, it outlives the paper on which it is printed through memories of words, phrases, readings, experiences, through conversations between people who have connected with one another because of its existence.

And Bob, like an orchestra conductor or a theatrical director, could fixate obsessively on the tiniest detail of phrasing or punctuation without ever losing his grasp of the whole enterprise. In many ways, “our little paper” is a fluid, ephemeral enterprise, writ on water, as Keats might say, but what does water do? When drop meets drop, the two merge to create a rivulet, a stream, the Amazon. Water moves forever onward, bound for the sea—except when it leaps, on clouds, straight into the sky. However fleeting an article, an issue, or a reader’s reverie may be in itself, the momentum they create, like the momentum of water, is relentless. Bob’s great gift was the ability to guide that momentum in every direction, into the desert, into the darkness, into the light. He lived, ultimately, for love and beauty, and he followed them into that good night.

ZADIE SMITH

A writer friend asked me: What was it about Bob? The edit? Or the commission? Another writer present—who also wrote for Bob—laughed at the word “commission,” and I realized I found it strange, too. Bob didn’t commission as much as elicit, a word whose Latin root means “to draw out by trickery or magic.” He was an expert eliciter. The very first time I wrote for him was because I made the mistake of saying, during the course of a casual conversation, “Well, I’ve been thinking a bit about Kafka.” Kafka! He said the name back to me as if I had just mentioned the very latest literary sensation. “Well, why don’t we see if something can’t be done about that?”

A fairly recent book about Kafka soon arrived at my door, then several others. Then articles and notes and more books. This was disarming. My experience writing for editors up to that point had been confined to British newspapers where the emphasis was upon speed, topicality, and personal alignment with the subject. There’s nothing a British editor likes more than sending out a recent novel about the Berlin Wall to a writer who only last year wrote a novel about the Berlin Wall.

I wrote on Kafka, it ran, we were off. Many more pieces on even less likely subjects followed. Bob gave a lot of freedom to his writers, but the way he handled pieces was the opposite of a free-for-all. It’s a combination difficult to describe. The things you could get away with at the Review you could never get away with elsewhere: Bob wasn’t a grammar weenie; he didn’t rule out the personal or obscenity. He prized rationality and clarity but not at the expense of passion. He taught you not to speak vaguely of “historical context,” or indeed overuse “vaguely,” or suggest that two things were “inextricably entwined.”

But it was more than that. He valued individual sensibilities, more than any editor I ever knew. Though often accused of relying on too small a circle of contributors, it cannot be said that his paper suffered from a uniformity of tone. To read it cover-to-cover was to experience stylistic whiplash, from the conversational to the drily academic, from aggressive provocation to the intimate or dreamily philosophic. Bob’s “paper” was a very broad church with a narrow entrance marked: if it’s good.

I don’t know if he ever realized how little I’d known or understood in the beginning. Didn’t know my favorite Sontag essays came out of this “paper,” or that Bob had edited Baldwin, or known Lowell intimately, or helped edit the early Paris Review. We’d had lunch quite a few times before I learned he was a Jewish boy from Long Island rather than the Bostonian wasp that—from his fancy suits and frequent references to Lowell—I had somehow imagined he was. But being very stupid about lots of things was not a disqualifying trait in Bob’s mind: like an indulgent parent he focused on your peculiar strengths. He was even a little suspicious of formal academic expertise, at least if it came at the price of a readable sentence.

His greatest pleasure was those people who approached his own intellectual ambidexterity: a doctor with a fancy prose style, say, or a president who understood and appreciated poetry. When considering such people he would get a very merry look in his eye—since he is not editing this piece let’s call it a “glint”—and say, “Well, now, he’s really a sort of genius you know, a genius! Ha! Ha!” Always the happy laugh at the end. Other people’s genius aroused no envy in him; it was only ever a source of delight.

About the rest of us he had a clear eye. She’s a bit weak on Iraq but absolutely marvelous on Alexander Pope. He knows everything about the theater but nothing at all about politics. This is presumably what allowed him to decide, very early on, that he wasn’t a writer himself, though I always found it hard to believe: the way he edited was effectively writing. It was like having a second architect appear during construction, suggesting a west wing here or a second floor. You could get a bit petulant about it. Have you considered x? is not always what you want to hear when you’ve just written two thousand words on y. But he was always right.

“Will Bob be there? I owe him a piece.” An anxious query tacked onto many an RSVP for a New York literary party. But even if you didn’t owe him you had to be careful: in company Bob was like a shark in a shoal, trawling for pieces, waiting for unsuspecting writers to drunkenly let slip that they were interested in Sibelius or Croatia or had a theory about Philip Glass. Sometimes the process of eliciting could feel a little like entrapment. Not because he was strict with a deadline, but because to agree to write something for Bob was to know there was no way you’d be phoning it in, you’d be holding yourself to the highest standard—his.

Perhaps the greatest aspect of Bob’s legacy is the generations of editorial assistants he spread abroad. Whenever I am being particularly astutely edited elsewhere it usually turns out that the red pen belongs to an ex-assistant of Bob’s. Thank God—I always need the help. Many of Bob’s writers were Nobel Prize winners, true geniuses, all-rounders of the C.P. Snow variety. They would have written brilliantly anywhere. But there were others, like me, from whom Bob not only elicited work, but helped directly to improve, educate, and form. I loved him for it and I’ll miss writing for him so much.

Additional remembrances of Robert Silvers by more than sixty New York Review contributors and friends can be found at nybooks.com/rbs.

The post Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017) appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Writing about The Fire Next Time in the first issue of this paper in 1963, F. W. Dupee said that James Baldwin, at his best, illuminated not just a book or an author or an age, but a strain in the culture. However, in The Fire Next Time, with its incendiary title, he thought that Baldwin had given up analysis for exhortation, criticism for prophecy. Dupee regretted Baldwin’s sweeping generalities—that white people do not believe in death, for instance, or that white people are intimidated by black skin. Yet Baldwin impressed him as “the Negro in extremis, a virtuoso of ethnic suffering, defiance, and aspiration,” which at this distance, even as praise, begins to sound a little weird.

The Fire Next Time is composed of two essays, the brief “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” which Dupee judged to be overly polemical, and the much longer “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” which he admired for its evocation of Harlem, Baldwin’s description of his flight as an adolescent into the pulpit, and his report on a visit with Elijah Muhammad at the Chicago headquarters of the Nation of Islam. Dupee trusted Baldwin when he had a concrete occasion for his reflections. But Baldwin’s “speculative fireworks” made him uneasy. Black Americans may have been ambivalent about being integrated into a burning house; nevertheless America was the only house they had, Dupee said.

We can’t get back to Dupee’s language, but maybe we can catch up to Baldwin’s. Remembering his surrender to God on a church floor, he wrote:

All I really remember is the pain, the unspeakable pain; it was as though I were yelling up to Heaven and Heaven would not hear me. And if Heaven would not hear me, if love could not descend from Heaven—to wash me, to make me clean—then utter disaster was my portion. Yes, it does indeed mean something—something unspeakable—to be born, in a white country, an Anglo-Teutonic, antisexual country, black. You very soon, without knowing it, give up all hope of communion. Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away. And the universe is simply a sounding drum; there is no way, no way whatever, so it seemed then and has sometimes seemed since, to get through a life, to love your wife and children, or your friends, or your mother and father, or to be loved. The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs—as who has not?—of human love, God’s love alone is left. But God—and I felt this even then, so long ago, on that tremendous floor, unwillingly—is white.

It was not as though existential loneliness and the black condition had been among what the Romantics called the previously unapprehended relations of things. Black writers were describing a living, unfolding history. While W.E.B. Du Bois was deep in his Communist phase, Richard Wright was the most eloquent black writer before Baldwin about political and social matters—more so than Ralph Ellison, though the fiction Wright was writing around the time Ellison produced his masterpiece Invisible Man (1952) was dreadful. Wright was living in Paris when he died in 1960, as the civil rights movement in America was intensifying. Baldwin inherited Wright’s themes and expanded on them, just as Wright had received his and added to them. Singular as they both were, Baldwin’s language could not have been Wright’s.

Toward the end of his life, Wright was seen as belonging to a bygone era, most notoriously by Baldwin himself, and Baldwin would be viewed similarly when he died twenty-seven years later. What is striking about the comparison between the two writers is not the fate of their reputations immediately after their deaths or over time, but that they both had been outspoken on race and both their writing lives happened to have ended during periods of conservative backlash in the US. But social activism is ceaseless in American history.

Black literature has been the most important repository of the history of opposition and the spirit of resistance in America. Not long after the 2016 election, PEN held a demonstration on the steps of the New York Public Library, at which three young white women read together from Letters to a Young Artist (2006) by the playwright and actor Anna Deavere Smith: “My job in my work is not to acquire power; it’s to question power. What I say I believe is that my job is to see the world upside down, to doubt, to question, to ask. I hope I believe what I say I believe.”

The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by the novelist and memoirist Jesmyn Ward, originated in her search for community and consolation after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012:

I needed words. The ephemera of Twitter, the way the voices of the outraged public rose and sank so quickly, flitting from topic to topic, disappointed me. I wanted to hold these words to my chest, take comfort in the fact that others were angry, others were agitating for justice, others could not get Trayvon’s baby face out of their heads…. I couldn’t fully satisfy my need for kinship in this struggle, commiserate with others trying to find a way out of that dark closet. In desperation, I sought James Baldwin….Baldwin was so brutally honest.

In addition to Ward’s own essay on her light-skinned family in Mississippi and what her discovery through DNA testing of her very mixed ancestry has done to her definitions of blackness, The Fire This Time features poetry by Jericho Brown, Clint Smith, and Natasha Trethewey, and Kima Jones’s remembrance of a grandfather’s wake that is like a tone poem. There are also thirteen essays by historians, journalists, novelists, critics, and other poets, all young, or youngish, and already accomplished.

In “Da Art of Storytellin’ (a Prequel),” Kiese Laymon, a novelist and a columnist for The Guardian, recalls his grandmother in Mississippi who worked as a “buttonhole slicer,” gutting chickens at a poultry-processing plant. When she came home from work she would say to him, “Let me wash this stank off my hands before I hug your neck.”

This stank wasn’t that stink. This stank was root and residue of black Southern poverty, and devalued black Southern labor, black Southern excellence, black Southern imagination, and black Southern woman magic. This was the stank from which black Southern life, love, and labor came.

But he didn’t understand “this stank” and the culture of black southern life until years later, through the revelatory power of hip-hop. When at college in Ohio in 1996 he heard the album ATLiens by the group Outkast, it changed his expectations of himself as “a young black Southern artist.” He said he knew he had to write in order “to be a decent human being.”

Mitchell S. Jackson, also a novelist, describes in “Composite Pops” how he made up his father from the men who came into his life: a witty pimp with whom his mother had two boys; his maternal grandfather, who became his “caretaker” after he ran away from his biological father; his maternal uncle, who trained him in track; his paternal uncle, a drug kingpin, from whom he learned how to hustle; and his biological father, a married man. Now the father of two children himself, Jackson extracts what could be called a tale of nurturing from a background of violence and dysfunction. In a humorous footnote, Jackson reviews the father substitutes of Obama, Washington, Jefferson, and Gerald Ford.

Several of the essays fuse personal past with cultural history as their authors locate where they belong in the black American story. Wendy S. Walters became interested in an African burial ground that had been discovered in 2003 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire:

Pieces of the skull, portions of the upper and lower limbs, shoulder girdle, ribs, spine, and pelvis of a male person between the ages of twenty-one and thirty years represent Burial 1. An excavator operator noticed his leg bones sticking out from the bottom of his coffin, which was made of white pine and was hexagonal in shape.

She hadn’t explored slave history until she began her quest in the library to learn more about the site and met resistance from custodians of colonial heritage who mistrusted her intentions.

The poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers reconsiders the role of Phillis Wheatley’s husband in her tragic life. Wheatley was an African child acquired by Boston merchants who proved such a scholar that in 1773 she published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Wheatley was freed, but not much is known about her life after the death of her former mistress and protector. Wheatley died in 1784, maybe thirty-three or thirty-four years old. The accepted story had been that she died after having lost three children to sickness in their infancy. Her husband, John Peters, an alleged wastrel, sold the manuscript of her second book of poems, which was then lost.

However, Jeffers questions the one source of information about Peters, a memoir published in 1834 by a white woman claiming collateral descent from Wheatley’s mistress. Spurred on by other scholars’ work, Jeffers tracked Peters through the census and legal documents. She speculates that he was a free man of education struggling in the volatile post–Revolutionary War economy. There is no certain evidence of how Wheatley died, or how many children she had, or if a child died with her. Jeffers suspects that John Peters, as a black man with aspirations, has been slandered in death.

Garnette Cadogan’s “Black and Blue” relates that in his hometown, Kingston, Jamaica, he was a walker, but in New Orleans, where he went to college in 1996, he had to learn that he did not have the same freedom to walk in a white-controlled city. A cop put him in handcuffs just for waving at him. After Hurricane Katrina he made his way to New York, in order to “continue to reap the solace of walking at night. And I was eager to follow in the steps of the essayists, poets, and novelists who’d wandered that great city before me—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Alfred Kazin, Elizabeth Hardwick.” But one night in the East Village he was running to dinner when a white guy punched him hard. He had assumed that Cadogan was a criminal. Strangely passive, or determined to survive, Cadogan went back to rules he’d set for himself in New Orleans: no running, no sudden movements, no hoodies, no shiny objects in his hand, no waiting on corners. But then he forgot and the next time he was hurrying to an appointment, he ended up handcuffed and humiliated by several policemen.

Cadogan notes that “walking while black restricts the experience of walking.” He cannot be alone, a flaneur occupied with his own thoughts. Instead of walking in Whitman’s or Melville’s steps,

more often I felt that I was tiptoeing in Baldwin’s—the Baldwin who wrote, way back in 1960, “Rare, indeed, is the Harlem citizen, from the most circumspect church member to the most shiftless adolescent, who does not have a long tale to tell of police incompetence, injustice, or brutality. I myself have witnessed and endured it more than once.”

“‘KNOW YOUR RIGHTS!’ the mural trumpeted in capital letters,” writes Emily Raboteau, a novelist and memoirist, who is also on foot in her essay, walking in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, and photographing street murals, which are reproduced in the anthology. A text in one mural begins, “Write down the officer’s badge number, name….” Another mural contains the words, “If you are Harassed by police…” Raboteau is looking at the city streets and thinking of when she will have to have the conversation with her children about how to protect themselves from the police.

Most of the essays in The Fire This Time describe suffering, defiance, and aspiration that culminate in identification with the Black Lives Matter movement. The poet Claudia Rankine remembers a friend whose first thought when she gave birth to her son was not what his name would be, but how she was going to get him out of the country. Rankine was born in 1963, days after the murder of four black girls in a church in Birmingham, Alabama. Just over a half-century later, a white supremacist massacred blacks at prayer in a Charleston, South Carolina, church. “Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here,” she writes.

In her essay Rankine discusses the reactions of black mothers to the murder of their sons. By requesting an open coffin and allowing photographs of Emmett Till’s disfigured body to be published after he was lynched in 1955, his mother was defying the tradition of whites posing in front of hanged black bodies, Rankine observes with passion. Michael Brown’s mother was kept from his body after he was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Tamir Rice’s mother moved into a homeless shelter rather than live near the scene of her twelve-year-old son’s killing by police in Cleveland the same year. The Black Lives Matter movement is, for Rankine, “an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness.”

In “Blacker Than Thou,” the poet and Schomburg Center director Kevin Young writes about the bizarre case of Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who passed for black and became head of her NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington:

When you are black, you don’t have to look like it, but you do have to look at it. Or look around. Blackness is the face in the mirror, a not-bad-looking one, that for no reason at all some people uglify or hate on or wish ill for, to, about. Sometimes any lusting after it gets to be a drag too.

But the murders in the Charleston church in 2015 made such a figure ridiculous, he concludes:

This morning I woke from a “deep Negro sleep,” as Senghor put it. I then took a black shower and shaved a black shave; I walked a black walk and sat a black sit; I wrote some black lines; I coughed black and sneezed black and ate black too. This last at least is literal: grapes, blackberries, the ripest plums.

Edwidge Danticat, in her discomforting essay “Message to My Daughters,” ponders whether African-Americans are like refugees in their own country. Born in Haiti, brought up in Brooklyn, where she knew victims of police violence, Danticat contends that black people have always been treated as a population in transit, housed and educated in conditions not much better than those of refugees. After Michael Brown’s murder, Danticat’s friend Abner Louima—we forget that he survived the police assault in 1997, when he was sodomized in a Brooklyn precinct station—told her that the young man’s death proved that “our lives mean nothing.” But Danticat doesn’t want her daughters to grow up terrified, as she did. She wants to be optimistic. Her version of Baldwin’s “My Dungeon Shook,” she promises, will ask her daughters to believe that they have a right to be here.

The theme of trespass is taken up by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, who was persuaded, as she remembers in “The Weight,” to make a pilgrimage to Baldwin’s home in St. Paul de Vence, France, two decades after his death. Though she couldn’t afford the trip, she had “an unspoken hoodoo-ish belief that he had been the high priest in charge of my prayer of being a black person who wanted to exist on books and words alone.” She’d had her spell of coolness toward Baldwin: he set the stage for every American essayist after him, but one didn’t have to emulate or worship him as “the black authorial exception.” She minded that every essay on race cited him and that he’d escaped to France while her grandfather, who was Baldwin’s age, could only hope for a little dignity in his working life.

Then Ghansah, born in 1981, went to work as the first black intern at a prestigious magazine in New York that had never had a black editor in its 150-year history. Her real world was a privileged one, but she found a need for Baldwin’s words, even there. In St. Paul de Vence, she toured a property without doors or windowpanes, beer cans strewn about, postings from the company that was to tear the house down. It was not his memorial: “He wrote it all down. And this is how his memory is carried…. What Baldwin knew is that he left no heirs, he left spares, and that is why we carry him with us.”

In part because of Baldwin’s example, many of the old questions are mute. Black Lives Matter—founded in 2012 by three women brought together on social media after one of them, Alicia Garza, responded to the murder of Trayvon Martin by writing an open letter to black people—tries to answer the question that confronted many in the Black Arts movement of the 1960s: How can an artist also be an activist? A black writer is by no means obliged to write about black matters. But Wright’s definition of the black artist who challenged power and defended blacks offers more than Ellison’s insistence that being the best novelist he could be was his contribution to the black struggle. Baldwin didn’t want to be Wright’s heir, any more than Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah wanted to be Baldwin’s.

But the young black writers in this anthology reflect in their work how long ago The Fire Next Time was. That world of blacks not looking at one another, ashamed to look at themselves, describes an atmosphere before the black consciousness movement that would spread soon after the publication of Baldwin’s essay. Some fifty years later, invisibility is over; the shame is gone. Nevertheless, Alicia Garza felt that what black people needed from her was a letter asking them to love themselves.

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Claude McKay has one of the most interesting life stories of the Harlem Renaissance writers, starting with how he got away from Jamaica, where he was born in 1889. McKay’s first two published volumes were of dialect poems, work encouraged by Walter Jekyll, the British folklore collector of Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. Jekyll’s sister was Gertrude Jekyll, the pioneer of the English cottage garden. Their grandfather was Joseph Jekyll, author of The Life of Ignatius Sancho, which served as the preface to The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, the correspondence of an eighteenth-century black musician in London whose friends included Laurence Sterne. Walter Jekyll was willing to pay for McKay’s education at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, expecting the dark, handsome young man to return to play a part in the agricultural life of the island.

But McKay never went back. From the racial terror of Alabama, he quickly made his way to the openness of Kansas. In 1914, McKay got to New York, where he was briefly married, survived by struggling with pots in kitchens, met black socialists and Communists uptown and white Communists and socialists downtown. By the end of World War I, his poetry in standard English, so called, had been published in Pearson’s Magazine by Frank Harris, friend of Oscar’s. However, McKay’s future lay with the radical journal The Liberator.

In 1919, race riots—whites attacking blacks—broke out in several American cities, the bloodiest one in Chicago. At the same time, the newly empowered FBI was deporting radicals such as Emma Goldman. In protest against the violence of the Red Summer and the Red Scare, McKay’s sonnet of defiance “If We Must Die” was published in The Liberator and widely reprinted in the black press. Suddenly, he was invited to London, where he spent a year working on the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst’s magazine, Workers’ Dreadnought. In 1922, he was off again, to the Soviet Union. He could not imagine his writing life subject to Comintern discipline and by 1923 he was once more on the move, from Moscow to Berlin, from Paris to Toulon, from Brest to Nice, from Marseilles to Rabat, from Barcelona to Tangier.

McKay was the vagabond poet, remembered back in the US for Harlem Shadows (1922), a collection provocative in racial content but conventional in its choices of poetic forms. He kept up his restless life even after the success of his first two novels, Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929). A collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), and another novel, Banana Bottom (1933), followed. They didn’t sell. McKay had been living in Morocco when in 1934 economic and political uncertainty pushed him back to the US.

A number of the writers who had emerged during the Harlem Renaissance died, fell silent, or failed to interest publishers once the Jazz Age vogue for things Negro ended with the Great Depression. We tend to think of black literature as a category of the avant-garde, but pathfinders like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were desperate for mainstream success, even as they looked for producers of their plays at the Federal Theater Project, begun in 1935.

McKay was no different. He resettled in Harlem and was employed by the Federal Writers’ Project until 1939, when noncitizens were barred from holding positions. He published two more books in his lifetime: an autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937), and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), an exhaustive survey of the ghetto. Neither did well and soon enough McKay was chronically ill and hanging on by teaching in a Catholic youth organization in Chicago, where he died in 1948.

McKay has been fortunate in the scholars who have been inspired over the years to explore his complex career. Selected Poems of Claude McKay appeared in 1953; Trial by Lynching, a pamphlet of three stories published in Russia in 1925, was translated back into English in 1977; a prettified memoir of his rural childhood, written in 1946, was published in 1979 as My Green Hills of Jamaica and Five Jamaican Short Stories. A British university press published Romance in Marseille (2001). Written in 1930, it is a sequel to Banjo, McKay’s novel about the quayside life in Marseilles of black immigrants from everywhere.

Wayne Cooper edited The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912–1948 (1973) when the Harlem Renaissance was being discovered by a new generation. In 1979 he found in the Slavic section of the New York Public Library McKay’s survey of the black condition, Negroes in America, published in Russia in 1922, a work not among his papers anywhere else. In his biography, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (1987), Cooper discussed McKay’s fluid sexual orientation, at a time when Langston Hughes’s biographer, Arnold Rampersad, concluded that Hughes was “a sexual blank.”

One third of the three hundred poems in McKay’s Complete Poems (2004), edited by William J. Maxwell, had not been published before. McKay hadn’t been able to interest anyone in the last two collections he put together toward the end of his life in New York. The chronological order of this volume gives the poetry biographical coherence; the sheer amount of it tells us the place McKay’s unhappy poetry had in his emotional life, though he published only one book of verse after he left Jamaica (he published an abridged edition of Harlem Shadows in England). Maxwell also showed for the first time that McKay’s twelve years of wanderlust were not a romantic interlude, but political exile. His name was on an FBI list because of his long visit to Russia; he was tipped off that he might be arrested should he try to reenter the US. The British authorities also were watching for him in home and colonial ports.

It’s hard to have anything new to say about the Harlem Renaissance; its major and minor figures have been under so much scrutiny already. However, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003) by Brent Hayes Edwards widened the Harlem Renaissance’s scope by examining in detail black publications in New York and black periodicals in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, finding connections among black writers that reached across language.

Similarly, James Davis in his wonderful biography Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean (2015), views his subject, a fascinating writer from Barbados, as a deliberate contributor to a literature of diaspora. Walrond, remembered now for the collection of experimental fictions Tropic Death (1923), lived, like McKay, on both sides of the Atlantic. He and McKay had a very bitter falling out that was never repaired. There was a reason the poet Sterling Brown preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance the New Negro Movement. As a writer whose experience is transatlantic, McKay is important to Edwards’s study of black internationalism and he is especially interesting on the influence McKay’s novel Banjo had on the Négritude movement in France in the 1930s.

Now Edwards has joined with Jean-Christophe Cloutier, the translator into English of two novellas that Jack Kerouac wrote in French, to introduce a novel by Claude McKay that had been lost, Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem. McKay moved around so much even in his Harlem life that he lost things. Cloutier found the typescript of Amiable with Big Teeth in 2009, among the papers of a marginal leftist New York publisher. It’s not clear how it ended up in that particular office. McKay wrote the novel in 1941, in one great push, in a remote spot up in Maine. Max Eastman, his ally and editor from his Liberator days, cautioned him not to rush the writing. But McKay was in a hurry.

When he first got back to the US, McKay wound up in a camp for destitute men in upstate New York. Eastman rescued him and helped him to secure a book contract that he fulfilled with his autobiography. Then the Federal Writers’ Project hired him. That, together with work on his ambitious survey Harlem: Negro Metropolis, kept him going for a while. His survey’s critical and commercial failure was a blow. Cloutier and Edwards point out that Amiable with Big Teeth was one of a series of projects that McKay hoped would steady his career. They speculate that he is smiling in photographs taken by Carl Van Vechten in 1941 because he had just that day delivered his manuscript. But the publisher from whom he’d had an advance rejected it. After it was turned down, he apparently never mentioned it in a letter or talked about it again. Instead, his health broke.

Amiable with Big Teeth depicts the attempts of prominent Harlem citizens to organize aid for Ethiopia when Mussolini invaded the African kingdom in the autumn of 1935. This was the period of the Popular Front, when Soviet policy was to act in coalition with liberal organizations and democratic governments throughout the West to resist fascism. Cloutier and Edwards explain that the title Amiable with Big Teeth is meant in the same sense as the biblical expression about false prophets: wolves in sheep’s clothing. McKay’s title announces his novel’s mission as an exposé. The ironic tone is in the “love affair” of the subtitle.

It had long been McKay’s contention that the Communist Party sought to exploit the grievances of black people for whatever ends the Comintern decreed. Black people are seduced by being taken seriously, given a forum, he said. In his novel, it is clear that he is on the side of the black people who know that Moscow is selling oil and wheat to Mussolini. They recognize that the Soviet government doesn’t care about Ethiopia:

He said he was not a Fascist nor was he a Communist. He said the Fascists, Nazis and Communists all believed in and practised a ruthless dictatorship over the peoples…. He could not imagine how a nation which held down millions of people under an iron dictatorship could be the chief sponsor of a People’s Front to safeguard Democracy.

Even so, they can’t prevent the Party’s agents in Harlem from wrecking their efforts. What stops them is not the Party’s control, but rather Ethiopia’s defeat. Haile Selassie’s troops were armed with spears when they faced Italian tanks.

Part of the novel’s documentary interest is that it is set in a Harlem that had gone out of fashion. McKay understood Harlem as crowd and communal ritual: street rallies, meetings in halls, church services, tea parties, back room smokers, dinner parties, bars:

Of the variety of dens and dives that pullulated in Harlem during the glorious intoxicating era of Prohibition, the Airplane was the only one of highly stimulating interest that was carried over into the revolution of Repeal—the only one that maintained its allure amidst the bountiful blossoming of bars and grills beckoning with gaily glittering neon lights and luxurious interiors.

Harlem: Negro Metropolis gives a sense that a lot of what McKay is describing he witnessed, visiting every cultist in Harlem himself, for instance. Similarly, his novel has the feeling of being set in a Harlem that he knew, including an Italian-owned bar frequented by lads with elongated eyebrows and rouged cheeks:

The Merry-Go-Round was the largest and bawdiest bar in Lenox Avenue…. It was the haunt of the gutterbugs of Harlem and the place par excellence where its elite went slumming. And like flies attracted by sweet scum, its customers came from all parts of New York. Polite-speaking Harlemites nicknamed the place the Marys-Go-Round, but the gutterbugs called it the Fairy-Go-Round.

A group pickets the bar, demanding that the “open cesspool” be shut down. Cloutier and Edwards tell us that in the summer of 1936, during the time the novel is set, an Italian restaurant in that Harlem location catering to that sort of clientele was, indeed, the scene of a riot.

The novel’s anti-Italian demonstration is led by “The Sufi,” whom McKay characterizes as a labor leader and sidewalk agitator. He’d been on his stepladder across from the bar for months, inveighing against the “den of abomination.” The Sufi is clearly based on a black Harlem community organizer of the period who renamed himself Sufi Abdul Hamid after his conversion to Islam. Hamid was involved in the Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work boycott of 1935, which forced Harlem stores to hire black clerks. He is the subject of Harlem Glory: A Fragment of Aframerican Life (1990), McKay’s unfinished novel that he began in 1936. Harlem Glory is also about Father Divine, famous in the 1930s as the head of a religious cult in Harlem. His flock made him flamboyantly rich, but he is largely forgotten now.

Cloutier and Edwards identify the models for a number of McKay’s characters, once household names in black life in the East. Casper Holstein was a black king of the Harlem numbers rackets from the Prohibition era who was known for his philanthropy. In McKay’s novel, his gangster from the 1920s has transformed himself into a respectable businessman who devotes himself to black freedom. McKay’s omniscient narrator approves of him more than he does of any other character in Amiable with Big Teeth.

McKay had destroyed the manuscript of his very first novel because he decided it was probably too risqué for the American market. Even after he toned things down he still wrote about lumpen characters and their low life. But he was determined early on to reject the notion that he wrote what was then called proletarian fiction. Both Home to Harlem and Banjo are picaresque novels that look at black life through the eyes of a young, displaced black intellectual. The episodic structure goes with his impressionistic evocation of Harlem or Marseilles, leaving McKay free to concentrate on his main character’s observational overflow. He could go on and on having his proxy look and wonder. McKay can only keep up the scenes of black life in his fiction for so long. Sooner or later he resorts to some sort of frank mediator or interpreter.

In Amiable with Big Teeth, so much was at stake for McKay in getting across how untrustworthy the Communists were that his portrait of a Harlem leadership class has little satire. His judgments against various characters seem to come from an underlying sadness. He offers revenge fantasy: members of a black fraternal organization ritualistically put to death the chief Soviet secret agent, even though it is too late to save Ethiopia. Cloutier and Edwards note that Harlem: Negro Metropolis contains similar material on Ethiopia, and that both it and McKay’s novel draw on Federal Writers’ Project research archives.

Joseph Harris’s African-American Reactions to War in Ethiopia, 1936–1941 (1994) stresses what a critical event the invasion of Ethiopia was for black America. Ethiopia had first been invaded by Italy in 1896, and that touched black American thinkers of the time. Then W.E.B. Du Bois’s Pan-African Congresses of the World War I era and Garveyism spread among black Americans the wish to have some kind of kinship with Africa through Ethiopia, the old black civilization on a continent not supposed to have any. White American writers lost faith in the Soviet Union because of its conduct during the Spanish civil war. McKay had been through the betrayal of Ethiopia already:

Principles had become meaningless in the universal social ferment, yet leaders of the people still talked as if principles were the same principles. It was no longer merely unscrupulous politicians who were changing principles quicker than a chameleon its color. But everybody was doing it.

John Dos Passos published his novel of disillusionment with communism, Adventures of a Young Man, in 1939. But unlike Dos Passos, McKay did not become ever more right-wing, even after converting to Catholicism just before he left New York in 1944. Richard Wright was adamant that he would not be like Harlem Renaissance writers. Histories of the Federal Writers’ Project show us that the two generations of black writers overlapped more than we tend to imagine. But it would appear that McKay could no more get along with the younger writers than he could with his peers, difficult soul that he was.

Then, too, it’s as though McKay had got to that particular theme of anticommunism too early, or too rhetorically, too topically. He was writing his novel after the Hitler–Stalin pact had been made and broken. Yet his handling of politics differs so much in tone from that of the generation of black writers who found advancement with the Party when other doors to publication were closed to them because of racism. He remembered the tragic factional disputes in the early days of the Russian Revolution.

Wright’s brilliant autobiography, Black Boy, had its original ending of his fallout with the Communist Party cut when it was first published in 1945. The edited chapters were published on their own as American Hunger (1977). Among Chester Himes’s early work is Lonely Crusade (1947), about Communist attempts to control a black union organizer at an airplane factory in California during the war. One of Wright’s failures, The Outsider (1953), is also about Party efforts to manipulate a black frontman. And in Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison transforms his experience with the Communist Party into allegory.

Perhaps the real difference is that McKay had never been one of the faithful, unlike Hughes and Paul Robeson. Cloutier and Edwards concur with Wayne Cooper that McKay’s political journalism in his last years represents his final achievement, but currently none of it is in print. Cooper writes in his bibliography to The Passion of Claude McKay:

Of all McKay’s unpublished material, his letters are by far the most important, from both a literary and historical point of view. He was an excellent letter writer, and necessity forced him to write many. A complete edition of his letters should someday reveal one of the great stories in Negro American literary history.

The intellectual was the only character missing in the American novel, Philip Rahv declared in “The Cult of Experience in American Writing” in Partisan Review in 1940, the year Wright’s best-selling novel, Native Son, was published. McKay was in Harlem, trying to hold on to his writing life, he who had had experience thrust upon him as a black man in a white world and responded by voicing opposition to totalitarianism in any guise and calling for black power. Justice for the oppressed was worth fighting for, all of his writing said. Everything was contained in the American novel except ideas, Rahv continued, on another planet, the one where black literature and its themes were ignored.

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A few years back I ran into Camille Brewer, a black American curator of contemporary art, on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem. “Look at this,” she said. She was turning the pages of Artforum, finding black artist after black artist. “It’s like Jet up in here.” Camille was referring to the glossy black news and entertainment magazine that had its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. “Until you get to the [museum] appointments pages,” she added. “Then things go quiet again.” The black presence in the contemporary art scene continues to feel like a recent cultural phenomenon, though the group and individual exhibitions of black artists that prepared the way for this moment took place some time ago.

A landmark exhibition, “Contemporary Black Art in America,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971, concerned primarily the abstract. It asserted a freedom achieved since the 1950s and 1960s when black artists such as Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis, Beauford Delaney, and Romare Bearden were criticized for moving away from representation in their work, as if abstraction were a kind of opportunistic calculation. In 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (2016), his study of modernism as a cross-cultural exchange for black artists, Darby English identifies the paradox: if they escape from what he calls the “representationalist, collectivist black-ideological norm,” they end up being thought of as not having much to say on “racialist issues.”

It was therefore important for some to be able to find Africanist traces in abstract work by black artists. “Painting itself cannot practice discrimination,” English wrote. However, by 1970, when Jacob Lawrence’s portrait of Jesse Jackson appeared on the cover of Time, the debate about the representational versus the abstract was becoming a sideline. That same year, a black curator, Kynaston McShine, mounted “Information,” one of the first major exhibitions of conceptual art, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994,” Okwui Enwezor’s exhibition of 2001–2002, seen in Berlin and New York, among other places, put on display art that was a synthesis of African artistic styles and European modernism, almost as a peace treaty between cultures. By this time Glenn Ligon, the black conceptual artist, and Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, had proclaimed the independence of what they called a “post-black” generation. To define “post-black” was one of the aims of Golden’s 2001 exhibition, “Freestyle.” Ligon and Golden spoke in the catalog of “the liberating value in tossing off the immense burden of race-wide representation, the idea that everything they do must speak to or for or about the entire race.” Black artists of the previous generation could say they did not want to be identified as black artists, but there was no need to go into further repudiations of the category when the only rule for black artists was that there weren’t any rules more important than to thine own self be true.

The catalog Four Generations: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art (2016), edited by Courtney J. Martin, shows that a history of blacks in American art can be told through means other than the representational or narrative. But the collection of Pamela Joyner and Alfred J. Giufridda also includes portrait photography and portrait painting. Time places the representational and the abstract in ever-closer cultural proximity. And the figurative has renewed importance now that painting enjoys a prestige that it has not had during the long ascendancy of conceptualism.

Hugh Honour tells us in The Image of the Black in Western Art (Vol. 4, 1989) that even though the number of artworks in which blacks were depicted increased in the 150 years from the abolitionism of the slave trade in Britain to the coming of modernism, such works were still a small fraction of those produced because there was no demand for them.^* Moreover, there was a profound difference between representations of black people in the visual arts and in literature. They appeared in religious and genre painting, but apart from Goya, few artists in this period were stirred to record the truth of what black people experienced in white societies.

Because blacks were identified with slavery they could be victims but not heroes in Western art, though the exceptions are notable: Henry Fuseli’s The Negro Revenged (1806), Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819), or Joshua Reynolds’s Study of a Black Man (circa 1770). But public opinion limited where art sympathetic to blacks could be seen. And the violence of racial segregation in the US and of colonial expansion in Africa called for caricatures of darky inferiority and the ethnography of half-naked savages. Black people were ugly and so was their story. Racism casts a long shadow over art. Today’s portraits of black people come from a complex history about the subjectivity of beauty and the presence of blackness in Western art.

The portrait painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye was born in London in 1977. For her solo exhibition at the New Museum, “Under-Song for a Cipher,” the three high walls on which her work hung were painted leather-red. Art looks good held up by a color field. In Yiadom-Boakye’s seventeen unframed portraits of black people, the paint continues to the edges of each canvas. There are no titles or wall texts beside them. Some are full-length, or nearly so, except for a triptych of horizontal portraits of a black male in profile, not always in the same shirt, reclining on a red striped blanket. Three paintings are of women, one of whom wears a white leotard; another is seated Indian fashion, seeing to the bun in her hair. Two barefoot women in profile in long skirts are depicted together, one seated in front of the other, who stands with a pair of field glasses aimed at something we can’t see to our right. It is the only painting in the exhibition that is not of one person or of one person and a cat or a bird.

A young man in a blue sweater sits at a table with a coffee cup; another youth is on a chair, his left leg raised. One guy has a bird; a laughing black youth has a beard. A barefoot brown youth is standing with his right leg crossed in front of his left. He looks straight at the viewer. A black man with beautiful eyes looks at the cat on his shoulder. The largest painting shows a barefoot brown-purplish youth resting on his left elbow in a grassy expanse. The black youths are dark-skinned—dark brown, not black—and Yiadom-Boakye concentrates her impasto in the faces. Dark colors come up in ridges to form hair, nose, shadows, lips, neck, chin; and instead of white pigment unpainted spaces appear in a figure’s outline or as highlights on the face. The surface surrounding the figures is very flat, as if scraped. Backgrounds are a mist or zones holding the figure in place and are not meant to tell us much. The body is a road to the face, the central concern.

The guys are good-looking. A youth in profile in a white T-shirt is somewhat androgynous; a beautiful youth with downcast eyes is a harlequin. A sleeping youth appears Expressionist in his angles. He’s got no crotch, but here and there a guy’s trousers may sport a V. A young man in a black tank top holds an owl in his gloved hand. He has a thin mustache and his look down his nose at us is full of condescension. The owl, wonderfully painted, has its own fierce expression. In the catalog the painting has a title, The Matters. You get the feeling that these guys are meant to be dancers and—maybe it’s in what Yiadom-Boakye makes of the openness of their expressions—that they are gay.

It takes two to make a portrait as well as an argument, Hugh Honour wrote. Yet these are not portraits of real people. Yiadom-Boakye has explained that they are composites, from “a combination of different sources: scrapbooks, drawings, photographs.” She said she thinks less about the figures than she does about how they are painted. She does not see them as portraits of characters with personalities to capture or suggest. “They exist entirely in paint,” as a technical problem to be solved: how to render in oil the fleetingness of the snapshot. Far from photorealism, they nevertheless have something of a stranger’s photograph collection. They are private, a riddle.

Yiadom-Boakye has also discussed how she executes each portrait in a single day. If she feels a particular piece hasn’t worked out, she destroys it. She says she always remembers the failures. The art she cares about is political because most art is, she says, which may mean that as a black artist she can treat the black body as normal. Her portraits have attitude, but they are not heroic, just as she has said that she is suspicious of beauty and instead goes after the sensual, what the skin gives off. Her approach to portrait painting—the choice to impose a challenge, a framing device, some sort of distancing mechanism—also speaks of her generation, when painting in particular was unfashionable, and conceptual art, installations, were on the way to becoming the new academic art.

There is a purple-backed portrait by Yiadom-Boakye of a dark young woman’s head and neck in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s summer show, “Regarding the Figure.” More than fifty pieces taken from the museum’s permanent collection (including paintings, photographs, sculpture, and one work of mixed media) aren’t displayed chronologically, but they have the range to make the show about different ways of putting new images of the black (by black artists, following the Studio Museum’s mandate) into Western art. Henry Ossawa Tanner’s undated lithograph The Three Marys shares a wall with The Room (1949) by Eldzier Cortor, a small portrait, perhaps of Billie Holiday, and with Jennifer Packer’s Ivan, a sexy 2013 portrait.

As a young artist in Paris, Hale Woodruff met Tanner in the late 1920s. Tanner was the first African-American artist to win recognition abroad. The French government purchased his Resurrection of Lazarus for the Luxembourg in 1897. But it was Picasso who inspired Woodruff the most. He studied with Diego Rivera in Mexico in the 1930s and is best known for his murals at black colleges, yet his struggle with Picasso is still going on in his oil painting Africa and the Bull (circa 1958) in the Studio Museum show. Also in the show is Bob Thompson’s The Gambol, a forest scene of figures on horseback, or dancing alone, and dark for someone remembered as a colorist. One couple, mere shapes, appears to be copulating astride a horse. Thompson said he wanted Old Masters to meet a jazz-inflected Abstract Expressionism in his work. He died at twenty-eight, in 1966, before anyone could criticize him for Eurocentrism.

Among the historical forces that artists of the post-black generation have declared themselves unafraid of is the European aesthetic tradition, just as there is no more talk of who isn’t black enough in his or her work. Some of the artists in the Studio Museum exhibition can be seen in the major museums of the city, but it makes a difference to see them as part of a history that goes from work made in a society where so many took it for granted that a black artist would never be as good as—fill in a great white name—to objects that are just not worried about that kind of thing anymore. The Harlem exhibition goes from one arresting piece to another. There is Lawdy Mama (1969), Barkley L. Hendricks’s life-size portrait of his cousin, beige Kathy Williams, with a big, round, brown afro, posed against a background arch of gold leaf. (This calls out to an intense Pre-Raphaelite-like portrait with much gold leaf, Elizabeth Colomba’s Daphne (2015), on display in the “Uptown” exhibition at the new Columbia University School of the Arts Lenfest Center.)

In the Studio Museum show, Njideka Akunyili Crosby depicts a couple in a room, Nwantinti (2012), a large work of acrylic, pastel, charcoal, and colored pencil on unframed paper. The newsprint plastered on the walls of the meticulously neat room is a Xerox transfer of graduation and family photographs. Repeated often in the transfers is the cover of the record “Love Nwantinti,” by the Igbo singer Nelly Uchendu. (“My journey with love/It will begin in a short time.”) The transfers bleed into the man’s trousers, arm, torso, chin, the bedspread, the floor. The pink walls are bathed in light. It’s impossible to tell whether the few clothes in the open closet behind the bed are a man’s or a woman’s, though the lovely young brown woman with short hair is barefoot and those must be her flip-flops beside the bed. She sits toward the edge of the tidy bed, a tender expression on her face as she looks down at the young man on his back, his head in her tight lap. A light source from a door and window grill strikes his quiet face and it can’t be said for sure if he is white or mixed-race.

A sharp black-and-white photograph by Zanele Muholi, Bona, Charlottesville (2015), has a nude dark black woman on her back on a bed, shoulders to the viewer, the back of her head and knees up. She holds on her stomach a large round mirror, reflecting only her face. Lyle Ashton Harris’s double self-portrait (2000), Untitled (Face #155 Lyle) and Untitled (Back #155 Lyle), shows him and his braids close-up, in black-and-white. Part of his Chocolate Portraits series, the photographs’ size (twenty by twenty-four inches) only seems to increase the vulnerability of the subject. Lorna Simpson’s 9 Props (1995) is exquisite. Its nine black-and-white waterless lithographs on felt panels show gleaming black glass vases or bowls that Simpson commissioned. They are stand-ins for the figures in Van Der Zee photographs: the artist Benny Andrews, for instance, taken in 1976. The captions under the glassware describe the figures and the interiors of the original photographs. “Wearing a trench coat, he is seated with the right leg crossed and holds it with his right hand. To his left is a small table with a circular top and a vase with Chrysanthemums…”

An acrylic-painted plaster wall relief of a woman laughing, Maria (1981), is from a series of South Bronx portraits by John Ahearn. Freestanding in the gallery is a six-foot sculpture of a dapper black man of a certain age, made from urethane foam, plaster, hair, and clothes: Isaac Julien’s Incognito (2003), a portrait of Melvin Van Peebles with his signature cigar in the corner of his mouth. No, he’s not real, a white mother explained to her child as she pulled his hand back. The piece is a surprise, because Julien is known chiefly for his films, video works, and photography.

Nearby is a small bust, St. Francis of Adelaide (2006), by Kehinde Wiley’s studio. The sculpture is under glass, because—made from cast marble dust and resin, and the color of a once-lit candle—it invites caress. The figure of the saint is a muscular, shaven-headed black youth in a basketball jersey or wife beater, with his right arm cut off. He is posed in quarter profile, with his left hand hugging an orb, book, and scepter to his body. (It was made around the same time that Wiley produced two other busts—not in this exhibition—in editions of 250: one after Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s La Negresse, but instead of a thick-haired black woman with her left breast exposed, Wiley uses a male figure, the same model as for his Saint Francis. The second piece is after Bernini’s bust of Louis XIV, but Wiley’s Sun King is a goateed black youth in a hoodie, not armor.)

Wiley’s work in portraiture is mostly on a monumental scale. Born in Los Angeles in 1977, his oil paintings seize on the European tradition, replacing the august or prominent personage in a famous portrait with a young black person. Wiley has also portrayed young black people in the place of the figure of a saint in stained glass or oil paintings. He chooses a highly processed realism for his black subjects, male and female, usually hip-hop in their fashion sense but sometimes haute couture, and very post-black in their hairstyles. The subject alone makes a cultural contrast with Wiley’s usual backgrounds of elaborate decorative motifs.

He bestows a different kind of visibility on black urban youth, and in his free use of the history of Western art it is hip to say that he demystifies it, makes up for that tradition of aristocratic portraiture in which blacks are depicted as adoring servants, almost pets. But actually he ends up doing something else, which is to make the viewer interested in his sources. For the most part black artists have aligned themselves with artistic movements that sought liberation from the past. Wiley is different; the past is not only an influence, it’s also a presence, a stage character.

In a recent exhibition at the Sean Kelly Gallery, “Trickster,” Wiley’s subjects weren’t black youths he spotted on the street who remain anonymous, but eleven fellow black artists: Derrick Adams, Hank Willis Thomas, Nick Cave, Carrie Mae Weems, Kerry James Marshall, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Yinka Shonibare, Wangechi Mutu, Glenn Ligon, Rashid Johnson with Sanford Biggers, and Mickalene Thomas. The title, “Trickster,” refers to the cultural hero in black folklore who survives or triumphs through cunning and skill. A trickster is ambiguous and can also change shapes, take on new identities.

Wiley is not coy and has always identified the Old Master—and sometimes later—models for his paintings. For instance, in this show he tells us that his painting of Yiadom-Boakye is after George Romney’s portrait of Jacob Morland of Capplethwaite (1763). Her hunting clothes and boots are not like Morland’s, but she is showing off the same rifle, and the background of pasture and family seat in the distance is also the same. Morland is posed with a hound, but she stands at her edge of the wood with five dead brown rabbits at her black boots. The rabbit is a trickster figure in both African-American and American Indian folklore. Then, too, the bold expression Wiley gives Yiadom-Boakye behind thick black-framed glasses fits the trickster character.

The portrait of Rashid Johnson and Sanford Biggers is subtitled The Ambassadors, after Holbein. Wiley has changed his figures’ postures: here, one of the artists is standing, his hand on the shoulder of the other, who is seated (in Holbein’s painting, the pair is leaning against a display of objects that speak of learning). But the green brocade curtain behind Holbein’s guys is behind Wiley’s as well, and the carpet draped over the shelf in Holbein is the one that Wiley’s barefoot, black-trousered figures are standing on. The clothing in Holbein is sumptuously painted and the same could be said of the loose, salmon-colored shirts that Wiley’s subjects are wearing.

References to the trickster in other cultures, like Reynard the fox, also appear in these paintings. Each canvas contains clues that point to the originals, and not necessarily to the works of the artist-subjects. Some are not as easily read as others, such as the portrait of an inscrutable Glenn Ligon as Hermes. Those are loafers, not winged sandals, so what is the frog he’s holding down on his knee? A terrific amount of painting is going on in these works, especially so, for example, in the details of the dress Carrie Mae Weems is wearing, posed with her back to the viewer, looking over her left shoulder. It is a virtuoso performance. Wiley has a great deal of humor and easy command. His subjects are rendered con amore, as Italians used to say of the best portraits.

Wiley depicts Kerry James Marshall as Lectura, in a triple portrait reminiscent of Van Dyck’s of Charles I. But is Marshall not much darker in skin tone than Wiley has painted him? And taking all the David-sized paintings together, isn’t every subject the identical high-affect brown color? Wiley’s revisions of what is called the canonical are a trickster’s art. Conversation with the past is for him essential. Neoclassical and Romantic painting were both about manipulating reality, Wiley said in an interview, as if to say, why shouldn’t his be?

It almost feels as though an Occupy High Art movement is happening. Black people changed the image of the black in Western art through what they were doing in the other arts and in the outside world. Perhaps instead of removing a statue of Robert E. Lee from a square in New Orleans, instead of appeasing justified feelings of anger at Confederate history, a black artist of Kehinde Wiley’s stature should be commissioned to do a public work in reply to that history.

These cultural sensitivities are not frivolous. How black people have been seen in history continues to influence how they are seen today. Yet the high visibility of blacks in the art world hasn’t done away with the critical defensiveness that made the controversy at this year’s Whitney Biennial over Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till such an embarrassing turf war among the second-rate. Till, age fourteen, was beaten to death in 1955 in Mississippi for supposedly having whistled at a white woman. The painting has no power unless, or until, you think of the horrific image of Till in his open casket on which it was based. Till’s mother gave Jet permission to photograph him so that everyone could see what he had suffered. Some people protested that Schutz, a white artist, had appropriated or was exploiting the pain of the black experience. But James Baldwin defended William Styron’s freedom to write The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), a very misguided novel about slave rebellion.

The most dramatic element in what is going on culturally may be that the image of the black is undergoing yet another change as a symbol. Put a black body up there on the canvas—not a light-skinned body but a dark one—and the work has immediate meaning, or seems profound, or to be a protest of some kind, an example of what Wiley has called the “weaponized aesthetic.” Maybe it has to do with what Black Lives Matter has revealed about black bodies: that they are still subject to racist violence. Even as vessels of desire they earn respect because of what they have been through historically, these young bodies.

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“I don’t know anything about immigration.”

“You live with an immigrant,” my boyfriend said.

“But I think of you as an Englishman in New York. Just passing through.”

“Yes, I’m an immigrant just passing through.”

The exchange showed me how much about race immigration is.

Is there a distinction between xenophobia and racism? If there is, then it would be that in the case of xenophobia, people who have never seen these other people before may be frightened or whatever, but they wouldn’t be proceeding from a theory of superiority.

In 1598, Elizabeth Tudor ordered her council to promulgate an order to expel “blackamores” from her kingdom because they had become too numerous. Was it because they were black or, as some historians have suggested, because they were non-Christian? Did black skin mean non-Christian and did non-Christian mean primarily Moslem?

And what happened to the eighteenth-century black populations of London and Bristol? What do we really know about Bristol-born Cary Grant’s family tree? Beethoven had a black grandfather, one of the “Spanish fleas,” black troops that occupied the Spanish Netherlands, according to the black journalist and amateur historian J.A. Rogers. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Rogers published, on his own, a three-volume work, Sex and Race, arguing that there is no pure, unmixed race in the modern world (apart from the Japanese—and look what good that had done them). Rogers started reading in libraries across Europe in the late 1920s, and then returned after World War II, an autodidact who wanted to demonstrate that the history of the world is that of people in motion, migrating populations.

We live in the wake of a profound population movement. In the past twenty-five years in China, two hundred million people are said to have left the countryside for the cities, some of which did not exist a quarter of a century ago. For how long have we been reading about African youth drowned in the Mediterranean? How bad must things be back in the societies where they came from for them to be willing to take such risks, given what they know, what they’ve heard, and the hard life that awaits them in Italy, Spain, and points north in Europe?

Angela Merkel deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. She was very brave morally and politically in her position on the Syrian refugees, as were many Greek citizens who defied their own panicked government in order to help desperate families in flight. Jihadist terrorist attacks in Europe are as much aimed against these Arabs as they are against Europeans—secular Arabs, middle-class Arabs, moderate Muslims, people trying to get away from the kind of regimes we would also be trying to escape. The attacks are designed to isolate such people further.

The strike that closed the Channel Tunnel two years ago backed up trucks at Calais. Refugees and migrants from nearby camps and centers fell upon the stalled convoy and hid themselves everyplace they could. The UK’s Channel 4 News interviewed one man who had been pulled from his hiding place by French police. His face obscured, the man answered that he was from Aleppo. He was a teacher. He taught Shakespeare. And the correspondent, even the presumably liberal guy you’d expect from Channel 4 News, betrayed a note of incredulity in his voice when he asked, Oh yeah? What’s your favorite Shakespeare play?

The man began to recite from Romeo and Juliet, at length, and had to be interrupted. People who have never heard of Shakespeare also deserve to be free, but what have we to fear from this man, in particular?

A Bavarian Catholic, an unmarried woman in her forties, surprised me when she called Merkel unwise. The Cologne attacks had recently happened and she said that was very dangerous to have so many single Arab men on the streets of German cities.

I thought of the medal my boyfriend gave me, struck in Munich to protest France’s use of Senegalese troops in the occupation of the Ruhr after the Treaty of Versailles: on one side, a thick-lipped, helmeted black man in profile; on the other, a European woman tied to the shaft of a soaring dick.

Europe doesn’t have a Muslim problem. It has a race problem. One that doesn’t get talked about, a history that doesn’t get connected to what is going on today. Paris has had a sizeable Arab population since the late nineteenth century.

In the aging societies of Western Europe, youth is being wasted. Young men are growing up excluded and policed, because of race, because of the past, because whiteness is the only form of wealth some of the people in these societies have. Meanwhile, young Greek people emigrate to Australia, and Portuguese youth are moving in significant numbers to Angola. But how weird is this: the Pakistani community in Birmingham, England, voted overwhelmingly for Brexit, although many Brexit backers were that kind of obnoxious white British anti-immigrant toff or lout.

In the Western Hemisphere, a literature of immigration has emerged. Junot Diaz speaks of the shadow of the United States that hung over his childhood in the Dominican Republic. It’s almost too easy to catch out the Founding Fathers either for their proslavery or for their anti-immigration pronouncements. Never mind Thomas Jefferson, for once: Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton both had a particular animus against German immigrants. Was every German a Hessian mercenary to them?

A substantial proportion of the Germans who came after the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 were artisans. In the 1850s, half of the immigrants to the US were Irish peasants who settled in the cities of the eastern seaboard. In the nineteenth century, hardly any large city did not have riots between old and new labor populations. Immigration as a subject, and immigrants as voters to be manipulated, have always been a feature of American political life. Before the 1908 election in New York City, officials tried to move voter registration to Saturdays only, in an attempt to exclude observant Jewish immigrants whom they feared would support the Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs.

It has also been true of American life that one of the ways in which despised white immigrants gained acceptance and a share in national identity was by subscribing to the racial order of segregation. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 put a stop to competition from Chinese laborers for jobs in the West. The Dawes Act of 1887 created Indian reservations and was celebrated by white politicians as an honorable conclusion to the “Indian Problem.” In 1896, the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation as law in Plessy v. Ferguson. European immigration all but stopped in World War I, and white agents who went South in search of black people to fill places in factories were sometimes met with violence from white landowners. But 500,000 black people rushed northward during the Great War, having escaped “the idiocy of rural life,” as Marx once described it. Segregation existed in the North, enforced by real estate companies that controlled where blacks and whites could live, as Lorraine Hansberry’s family tried to tell us.

In 1922, the Supreme Court declared that Japanese people were not Caucasians and therefore not eligible for citizenship. Black American literature in the twentieth century not only deals with the subject of black people who pass for white as an individual solution to a mass problem, it also talks about the fluidity of Spanish or Latin American identity. Places where they’d be thrown out as black Americans would accept them as Cuban or South American. But again, that depended on where you were.

This tolerance was not necessarily found in literature set in the West or Southwest. With the Great Depression, America began a casual deportation policy of Mexicans, each case more or less at the discretion of whoever picked them up. By this time, there were quotas based on where immigrants came from, and we had learned that religious persecution abroad did not mean much to the US authorities.

The idea of America as a proud nation of immigrants was first made popular by John F. Kennedy in 1958, I remember reading in Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Oxford History of the American People.

One person is an expatriate, an exile, especially if that person is of bourgeois culture, someone who can be assimilated according to an obsolete cultural ideal that most white people couldn’t begin to describe. But a mass of people from elsewhere, especially a working-class mass, that is an immigrant population. What I find sad is that we all know this history. Even the white supremacists prepared to sue those who would call them white supremacists know it. Everyone knows we are a nation of immigrants, that immigrants are good for the economy, and that freedom seekers are our kin. What is sad is not the subscription on the part of so many to old settler attitudes, but that I had not thought that all those debates that we read about as nineteenth- or early twentieth-century history are back, to take a final stand. We did not think the ideal of liberal democracy, the open society, would have to be fought for all over again. We are so spoiled we thought that it just grew naturally with everything else we have in our gardens of relative good fortune.

Adapted from remarks delivered at a panel discussion on immigration at the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 17, 2017.

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Come again, Professor Hardwick said, doing that seesaw dance with her shoulders, as if to say, get a load of him. I’d no idea what she was talking about. She nodded toward the blue-and-magenta paperback on top of my notebook: it was by a distinguished, elderly member of the Columbia faculty. If I was reading that for a class, then I should drop that class right away. Who, she wondered, apart from the professor himself, would make students read him on the Romantics. Not much of interest there, she finished.

The exchange happened faster than it has taken me to recall it, from her getting settled in her seat, to me, the apple-polisher, claiming first chair and opening another notebook. She’d laughed at the class for our thinking we would want to take notes. Most of us persisted. She taught by quotation and aside, citation and remark, stone down the well and echo. Most of her lessons were for later. She would peer over the book and exhale, trusting to Fortuna that somebody sitting around the table might get it eventually.

Perhaps Professor Hardwick wanted to drift off, through the window and away, but she couldn’t. Literature meant too much to her and was the only kind of writing she wanted to teach, not that it could be taught. She hoped we’d learn to ask questions of ourselves as we wrote. How can you sustain this tone? Then enough was enough, on to the next person and her or his fifteen minutes of lip-parting attention. I’m afraid I don’t find that terribly interesting as an approach, she’d say. Your weekly offering was not much commented upon; she much preferred to be interested in what she was reading. Boredom was not listlessness, it was a nervous strain, while to be occupied with something like a great book could be wonderfully, sometimes painfully, liberating. Pedagogy—a word she would make fun of, starting from the dash. In the essays of Elizabeth Hardwick that dash is often a warning—beware of sting.^*

We, her fascinated and silent creative writing class at Barnard College in 1973, knew who she was. Needful facts, as she would say: Elizabeth Hardwick, born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1916, left graduate school at Columbia University because she wanted to write. I don’t remember if she told the class that or not. Her first novel, The Ghostly Lover, was published in 1945. The first thing I ever read by her was the opening chapter of Sleepless Nights, the novel she was writing then under the title The Cost of Living. That stunning first chapter was published in The New York Review of Books while I was in her class. She told me later—it has been one of the honors of my life to have studied with her and to have benefited from her generous conversations about literature down through many years—that Stuart Hampshire wrote her at the time to say that the chapter was so amazing he couldn’t imagine how she’d be able to go on from there. As a beginning, it was an impossible act to follow. She said she found out that he was right and she ended up breaking up the chapter and redistributing it throughout the novel.

I was about to say that because I’d read her fiction first I always thought of her as more than a critic. But I can hear how blistering she’d be about that phrase—more than a critic. For her, literary criticism had to be up there with its subjects; real literature should elicit criticism worthy of the achievement in question. We got that from her straight off. The kind of modern literary criticism she was talking about—Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Edmund Wilson, Randall Jarrell, R.P. Blackmur, John Berryman, F.W. Dupee, Mary McCarthy—was as stimulating as the work it was exploring. Then, too, she wanted us to take seriously the essay as a form. The American essay—Thoreau, Emerson—was an important part of American history.

Professor Hardwick had a fearsome reputation on campus. She wasn’t regular faculty; she was that lowly thing, the adjunct, a very New York position in a city full of writers who supplemented their income or saved themselves by the odd teaching job. She did not undertake her duties lightly. She stood for something. The New York Review of Books, for starters, and that was intimidating enough, once I learned what it was. From the very beginning, I understood that Elizabeth Hardwick was what used to be called a writer’s writer.

We would all be better off in law school, because writing wasn’t a profession exactly, and certainly not much of a life. She discovered that I thought Grub Street was a novel by Dickens. She made fun of your choices, what you were wasting your time on, but she never made you feel odd for not having heard of something. It was just what you didn’t know yet. Grub Street in Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope was an experience to look forward to, like Gissing’s novel, as she once had, up from the University of Kentucky, refusing to be buried alive in graduate school. Moreover, the more you read, the more discriminating you became about what you read. She lived to read. Her passions were instructive.

Of Hardwick’s published work, a slender volume of short stories, The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, took a lifetime to accrue, and her three novels, The Ghostly Lover, The Simple Truth, and Sleepless Nights, are separated by many years. We think of the essay as a constant in Hardwick’s writing life. She published her first review in Partisan Review in 1945. In the late 1940s, Hardwick, then in her early thirties, was already doing the “Fiction Chronicle” for Partisan Review, writing, for example, about Kay Boyle, Elizabeth Bowen, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, and the dreadful Anaïs Nin. Philip Rahv, together with William Phillips, had revived the journal in 1937 as the organ of the anti-Stalinist left, and in the postwar years, Partisan Review, that ring of bullies, she called it, was central to the New York intellectual scene, anticommunist, dissident.

What she remembered as the cutting reviews of her youth were long ago. Attacks on inflated reputations were moral battles for young writers just starting out. She said often that it is much harder to write about what you like than it is to write about what you don’t like. One of the things she admired about Susan Sontag, she said much later, was that her essays were mostly appreciations, enthusiastic introductions to an American audience of the avant-garde European culture she cared about.

It was a pleasure to discover a forgotten writer—one who was worth it. Sometimes a campaign on someone’s behalf doesn’t work. Hardwick didn’t think she’d done anything for Christina Stead—as yet. But one day her view of Stead might be more widely shared. She was amused by Gore Vidal’s attempts to revive Frederic Prokosch’s fortunes. When Dawn Powell’s novels were coming back into print, Hardwick said she knew that Powell had had a hard life and it was very much like a man for Edmund Wilson to have lost interest in her because she was not pretty, but even so she did not want to write about her enough to do it. Sympathy for an intention was not going to make a book any better than it really was, and the danger of writing from a preconceived position was the harm having to be false does to a writer. No constituency was worth the sacrifice, she cautioned, in those days of feminist and black-nationalist pressure.

Elizabeth Hardwick wrote about what engaged her. Over the years, I would hear her say that she’d had to tell an editor she didn’t want to write about a certain book or author because she found she didn’t have anything interesting to say after all. It pleased her that John Updike reviewed books, so few novelists of his stature did. She paid attention to what went on in her world, that of serious literature, in English and in translation, and matters of cultural and social interest, an all-hands-on-deck kind of service. She was reasonably aware of audience, of just who was picking up what at the newsstand. But it didn’t matter if she was writing for glossy publications with her eye on the word count, for a venerable quarterly with a thick spine, or for a newspaper book-review section not looking for controversy. Every assignment got Hardwick at full sail, all mind and style. Nothing is casual, she said. You are always up against the limits of yourself.

Hardwick published four original volumes of essays in her lifetime. The majority of the essays gathered in A View of My Own: Essays on Literature and Society (1962) first appeared in Partisan Review. Several of them are, as she would say, of considerable length, and in them she is reading letters, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, novels, poetry, sociology, psychology; she is going to plays and looking back on cities where she has lived. The title perhaps asserts the value of her opinions, of their being hers—when A View of My Own was published she had been married for more than a dozen years to Robert Lowell. She’d been one of the few women writers associated with Partisan Review, and she was the only other one to join Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt as women writers who had their own identities at the magazine and weren’t known as literary wives.

In 1959, in an article that appeared in Harper’s, “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” Hardwick attacked what she described as the “unaccountable sluggishness” of book-review sections. There “had been room for decline…and the opportunity has been taken.” Sunday mornings with the book reviews is “often a dismal experience.” She was just getting started. “The flat praise and the faint dissension, the minimal style and the light little article, the absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity—the lack, at last, of the literary tone itself—have made The New York Times into a provincial literary journal.” The drama of the book world was being slowly, painlessly killed, she went on; she deplored the lack of strong editorial direction in such publications:

The communication of the delight and importance of books, ideas, culture itself, is the very least one would expect from a journal devoted to reviewing of old and new works. Beyond that beginning, the interest of the mind of the individual reviewer is everything. Book reviewing is a form of writing.

In Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s documentary about The New York Review of Books, The 50 Year Argument (2014), Robert Silvers reads from Hardwick’s article on book reviewing. He’d been the young editor, just back from The Paris Review and his houseboat on the Seine, who urged her to write the article. In the film, he tells the Town Hall audience commemorating the Review’s fiftieth anniversary that Elizabeth Hardwick’s words were on his mind when, in 1963, Hardwick, Lowell, Jason Epstein, and his wife, Barbara Epstein, founded The New York Review of Books. They asked Silvers to be co-editor, along with Barbara Epstein. For Hardwick, The New York Review was freedom. Whenever she chose, what she wrote could now have the most honorable of destinations. “The drama of real life will not let down the prose writer,” she observes in “Grub Street: New York,” her first published essay in The New York Review.

The New York Review distinguished itself for its unaccommodating reflections by some of our best writers on the catastrophe of the Vietnam War. Hardwick liked what she thought was Poe’s phrase—it is Shelley’s, someone wrote in to the editors years ago—“the intense inane.” In her own pieces for “The Paper,” as the founders called it, during the turbulent 1960s, she thinks about Selma and Watts, and goes to the march of the striking garbage collectors for whom Dr. King had come to Memphis, Tennessee, when he was killed. She considers the coarse power of popular works about the sexual revolution. Her candor is a pleasure, her judgments unexpected. She once said that Lowell was made uneasy by the thought of what she might contribute to The New York Review. After her essay on Robert Frost appeared, Lowell complained to her, only half jokingly, that she was just going to attack all his friends.

In this period, Hardwick went to the theater a great deal. (Lowell’s adaptations for the stage were written in the 1960s.) Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts opened down the street from where she and Lowell and their daughter, Harriet, lived—the Epsteins and their two children were only a few doors away—and maybe she could escape her family obligations long enough to immerse herself in a fleeting experience, in imagining others. She has a way in her theater reviews of sounding as though she has just come in, still talking about what she has seen. Moreover, she is coming through the door and analyzing real people as she takes off her coat. Nora, Hedda, their problems.

Hardwick’s detractors used to say that in her criticism she didn’t make enough distinction between fictional characters and the real world. While she was curious about different traditions in the arts, realism on stage, on the page, spoke to her with the most force. She writes somewhere that characters can make structure. But perhaps it is because in realist drama and fiction much depends on a character’s motives. It is through the conscious or not-conscious-enough depiction or projection of what is driving the work that the writer’s meaning can be discovered. Hardwick had a thing about people, whether imagined or real, and what made them tick, what their stories were. To have insights, or true insight, about human nature and human histories was the essence of her critical spirit.

An avid reader of old and new works, Hardwick never stopped thinking about the state of fiction. Then, starting in 1970, with an essay on Zelda Fitzgerald, came a series of essays on women writers, taking in treasured amateurs, Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Carlyle, as well as the geniuses, the Brontës, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf. The essays accumulated quickly, for her, and became the volume Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (1974). The era provided occasions, new biographies of culturally important women, for instance, and there was a marked increase in interest in women writers past and present. The second wave of feminism made an immediate difference in American literature. Then, too, Hardwick’s way of seeming to understand their lives from the inside perhaps came from knowing something herself about woman’s fate. Lowell split up with her in 1970 and they were divorced in 1972. The following year, he published The Dolphin, in which he tells through his poetry his version of the end of their marriage and his move to another country in order to be with another woman.

Hardwick would draw on her work in The New York Review of Books to fill out two additional books of essays: Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays (1983), in which the malicious, handsome Frost comes to life again, and Sight-Readings: American Fictions (1998), which was somewhat revised for its paperback edition the following year as American Fictions.

I thought to look again at Melville’s story, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” because it carried the subtitle: “A Story of Wall Street.”

There did not appear to be much of Wall Street in this troubling composition of 1853 about a peculiar “copyist” who is hired by a “snug” little legal firm in the Wall Street district. No, nothing of the daunting, hungry “Manhattanism” of Whitman: “O an intense life, full to repletion and varied!/The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!” Nothing of railroad schemes, cornering the gold market, or of that tense exclusion to be brought about by mistakes and follies in the private life which were to be the drama of “old New York” in Edith Wharton’s novels. Bartleby seemed to me to be not its subtitle, but most of all an example of the superior uses of dialogue in fiction, here a strange, bone-thin dialogue that nevertheless serves to reveal a profoundly moving tragedy.

The essays of Sight-Readings, or American Fictions, like those of Seduction and Betrayal, have a unity just in being what they are about: the American experience, the assumptions of national character, even the influence of the landscape or the mythic landscape. For Hardwick, the poetry and novels of America hold the nation’s history.

What mattered most in the end was a writer’s language. She adored Dickens for his wildness, Conrad for his independence of usage, Henry James for his eccentricity, his stunning excess, and William James for being such a nice guy about his ease of expression. Hardwick did not write about everything that interested her. Sometimes she didn’t feel equal to the task, given what the work deserved or what had been said about it already. You always wish she’d said more about her subject—so did she, she once laughed, but she couldn’t. The helpless compression of her fiction can be felt in the essays. The economy expresses her temperament. She won’t tell you what you already know. Part of the freedom of The New York Review was that she didn’t have to spell everything out. Its readers were sophisticated, or wanted to be.

That conciseness, not wanting to waste anyone’s time or mar her style with lumber, not only meant that it took a long time for the essays to add up but that she did not conceive of book-length nonfiction projects. Spinning things out, beating things to death, going on and on just to get from cover to cover—that is what academics did, and whatever they did was not to be done. Never mind that many of the writers she respected also taught. To have come of age at Partisan Review maybe accounted for her lack of interest in the New Criticism of the McCarthy era and its concentration on the text at the expense of the social or historical context. She was similarly indifferent to deconstruction and its influence on academic criticism in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. What she held against academic criticism was that most of it was so badly written. She blamed the computer for finishing a lot of books that ought not to have been.

And then she did commit to a book-length project, a critical biography of Herman Melville for the Penguin short biography series. She said somewhere that Faulkner was the greatest American writer, but in spite of his unevenness she maybe loved “the extraordinary American genius” of Melville more. Herman Melville, her astonishingly moving study, was published in 2000. It was to be Hardwick’s last major creative effort. An unkind review from someone who, she said, clearly had never read Moby-Dick made her resigned, diffident about bringing out anything else.

Her late essays in The New York Review showed her fascination with sensational murder cases of the 1990s. She was looking for a way to write about murder in literature and murder in real life, the difference being that in literature you can study motive, get reliably on the other side of the lies. She kept fewer notes on the subject as time went by. She never liked publishing a book anyway, she said. The vulnerability, she did not need to say. To publish in The New York Review meant that she was protected; but it also spurred her on to do her best because of the essays that she knew were going to surround her, the company she was going to keep.

Elizabeth Hardwick’s nonfiction—imaginative prose, she called it—spans six decades and includes book reviews, theater reviews, thoughts on opera, travel writing, literary criticism, social essays, memoir. Most of the essays in the new collection are of her literary subjects, her excited contemplations of writers on their paths. She approaches their work through their lives, or looks from a work to the life. Hart Crane’s letters tell her that maybe he didn’t jump overboard, maybe he was having a happy life as a lover of men and of the grape. Three volumes of George Eliot’s letters reveal the drama of a woman of melancholy genius at the mercy of her intelligence. Hardwick paid attention to the domestic, to the intimacy—and limitations—of letters and diaries. In her masterful essay “Memoirs, Conversations, and Diaries,” she explores what Boswell and the Goncourt brothers mean in their literary cultures.

But as interested as Hardwick was in diaries and letters, she was always troubled by biography, a genre that feeds on these things as raw material. A biography of Hemingway that she was reading is just plain “bad news”—for Hemingway. Her compassion for Dylan Thomas suggests that she may have seen him in the desperate condition of his last years, and Delmore Schwartz, too. She knew Katherine Anne Porter and had been around Frost enough to remember his aura. She wrote about Edmund Wilson and Norman Mailer and their biographies, or the mess Capote made of memoir. It is clear in her essay on Elizabeth Bishop’s prose that she knew her, but also that she found the work striking long before she met Bishop, reading her in Partisan Review down at the University of Kentucky in 1938.

Hardwick looks at the riddle of Graham Greene’s novels about sin and heresy or ponders the fates of the two women in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. She follows Byron’s and Pasternak’s mistresses and sad Countess Tolstoy into their afterlives. She wrote about Auden, Huxley, and Isherwood in America; the literary gifts and accumulation of losses that Nabokov brought with him to America; and the last days of Dylan Thomas in New York City. But as time went by the individual writers whose work she addressed tended to be American.

Melville, Henry James, and Edith Wharton were foundational as novelists of certain kinds of American experience that still have resonance. Carl Sandburg, Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis, Nathanael West, and Thomas Wolfe are in themselves American tales. Margaret Fuller, Gertrude Stein—who anticipated Philip Glass, Hardwick says—and Djuna Barnes are women writers, rebels, but also Americans abroad. Joan Didion expresses the restlessness of the America Hardwick felt around her. Yet in the provocative essays included here on the writer’s life or the changes in American fiction and its possibilities over the years, her reading is wide, international.

When you open the doors, so to speak, to one of her essays, you can sense there on the threshold that this is going to be interesting. She always makes you add to your reading list. In line after line, she is saying things you had not thought of, or telling you something that it is stirring to be told. Her love of literature has in it a profound humility. There is nothing cruel in her intelligence. Her wit and charm are unerring, unfailing. You didn’t know the skeptical mind could be so graceful. Her concentration is complete. Elizabeth Hardwick can surprise you. You didn’t know you would need to stop right there and go think about what she has just said. You reemerge, you look up, and you’d no idea her beauty of expression had taken you so far away. Or you didn’t expect such exhilaration just from reading about reading. It isn’t only what she is saying, it’s how she is saying it. Her prose style is unmistakable and like no other.

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Constance Cary Harrison, first seamstress of the Confederate flag, remembered Virginia after the execution of John Brown in 1859. Her family lived far from Harpers Ferry, scene of Brown’s slave uprising:

But there was the fear—unspoken, or pooh-poohed at by the men who were mouth-pieces for our community—dark, boding, oppressive, and altogether hateful. I can remember taking it to bed with me at night, and awaking suddenly oftentimes to confront it through a vigil of nervous terror, of which it never occurred to me to speak to anyone. The notes of whip-poor-wills in the sweet-gum swamp near the stable, the mutterings of a distant thunder-storm, even the rustle of the night wind in the oaks that shaded my window, filled me with nameless dread. In the daytime it seemed impossible to associate suspicion with those familiar tawny or sable faces that surrounded us…. But when evening came again, and with it the hour when the colored people (who in summer and autumn weather kept astir half the night) assembled themselves together for dance or prayer-meeting, the ghost that refused to be laid was again at one’s elbow.

In the savage, undreamed-of slave system in the New World, Africans were physically and mentally subjugated, worked to death, and replaced. Only when the enslaved labor population was maintained by reproduction and not by the importation of replacements were they given enough to eat to sustain life, and that was more than one hundred years after Louis XIV’s Black Codes licensed barbarism in the Caribbean. Black Retribution is the root of White Fear.

Harriet Beecher Stowe tried to portray a Nat Turner–like character in Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), the novel that followed her sensation, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Stowe gives Dred the pedigree of being the son of Denmark Vesey, the leader of a planned slave revolt in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822. But she turns her Nat Turner into Robin Hood, and he never gets around to his slave uprising, perhaps because Stowe could not bring herself to depict the slaughter of white people at the hands of black people. You could say that Kara Walker’s work begins at the threshold of this resistance to imagining and historical memory. Before John Brown there had been Nat Turner; before Denmark Vesey, the Haitian Revolution; before Mackandal’s Rebellion, Cato’s Rebellion.

In Kara Walker’s exhibition of twenty-three new works, mostly on unframed paper, at the Sikkema Jenkins gallery in New York, it is as though she has drawn her images of antebellum violence from the nation’s hindbrain. Walker has been creating her historical narratives of disquiet for a while, and they are always a surprise: the inherited image is sitting around, secure in its associations, but on closer inspection something deeply untoward is happening between an unlikely pair, or suddenly the landscape is going berserk in a corner. It has been noted in connection with Walker’s cutouts what a feminine and domestic form the silhouette was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that because of its ability to capture the likeness of a person in profile it was also a kind of pre-photography.

In a large work of cutout paper on canvas in the exhibition, Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might be Guilty of Something), that tranquil, even sentimental atmosphere of the silhouette gets deranged, disrupted. From a distance, you see a harmonious pattern of big and small human figures, adults in Victorian dress and children, some naked. There are children upside down along the top of the canvas, and the procession of figures seems to be tending to your right in frieze-like spatial orderliness. Then you make out that a black man has hooked a white man by the back of his shirt with a scythe, while two black women seem to be committing infanticide.

“Visual culture is the family business,” Hilton Als notes in Kara Walker: The Black Road (2008). Her father, Larry Walker, is a painter and teaches art, and her mother, Gwendolyn Walker, is a dress designer and seamstress. Born in Stockton, California, in 1969, and educated at the Atlanta College of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design, Walker was criticized by some black artists at the beginning of her career for using what they considered stereotypical black images from the nineteenth century that they claimed spoke primarily to a white audience. But the titles of her early installations of black cut-out silhouettes on white walls more than give the game away: Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994) positions a Gone with the Wind–style romantic white couple so that the man’s back is turned away from the images of black women and their sexual bondage; The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (1995) finds Stowe’s white lamb of innocence armed with an ax; and No mere words can Adequately reflect the Remorse this Negress feels at having been Cast into such a lowly state by her former Masters and so it is with a Humble heart that she brings about their physical Ruin and earthly Demise (1999) has against a gray background silhouettes of black women’s heads attached to swans’ white bodies.

Of her 2000 installation Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On), in which she projected onto the museum walls cut, pasted, and drawn-on colored gels, Walker said:

Beauty is the remainder of being a painter. The work becomes pretty because I wouldn’t be able to look at a work about something as grotesque as what I’m thinking about and as grotesque as projecting one’s ugly soul onto another’s pretty body, and representing that in an ugly way.

She said she was thinking of Thomas Eakins’s surgical theater paintings as she was also imagining house slaves disemboweling their master with a soup ladle. Beauty? She went on to say that her narrative silhouettes were her attempts to recombine or put back together a received history that has already in some way been “dissected.” But the images emerged from her subconscious, she warned, and she couldn’t necessarily explain their meanings. Her retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 2007 was entitled My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. As graphic and unmistakable as they often are, what story her images tell as a whole is not easily read. The poet Kevin Young has observed that Walker’s early works were fantasies, however sadomasochistic. But then her work became more obviously related to American history.^*

They are foreboding, stealth-like, those silhouettes of black people that haunt a riverbank or slip across newsprint in her 2005 series of lithographs and screenprints, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). She takes prints of the engravings or pages from a popular nineteenth-century album-size book that features numerous illustrations of maps, battles, and events relating to the conflict and superimposes on them out-of-scale black figures. The presence of black people as if from another dimension has the effect of being a commentary on the scene to which they have been added. (Another version of the series was done in photo offshoot in 2010.)

In this autumn’s Post War & Contemporary Art sale at Christie’s is a scene from the series called A Warm Summer Evening in 1863, which shows a commotion of men around a house in flames. The caption below—The Rioters Burning the Colored Orphan Asylum Corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street, New York City—refers to an incident during the Draft Riots of 1863, when poor white men, mostly Irish, who could not buy their way out of the army attacked blacks. One hundred and nineteen people were killed, some two thousand injured. Walker superimposes over the scene the figure of a black girl who has hanged herself with her own long braid of hair. The piece, done in 2008, roughly eight feet across and five feet high, is made of felt on wool tapestry. Maybe a computer told a loom how to weave the image of the engraving. Or was it done by hand? However it was achieved, it is an extraordinary piece of work.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. stresses in Black in Latin America (2011) that most of the kidnapped from the African continent were taken to South America and the Caribbean; only a small percentage went to North America. In the Sikkema Jenkins exhibition, one of the large works, Brand X (Slave Market Painting), in oil stick on canvas, shows a white man lolling in sand, his dick exposed, as if he’d just raped the black woman tied down on her stomach nearby (see illustration on page 55). Around him dance instances of rape and murder. You see a volcano in the distance and the suggestion of a tropical tree. (Cartoon Study for Brand X is an affecting portrait of a black woman, done in oil stick, oil medium, and raw pigment on linen.)

But Walker’s slave history generally refers to the United States. Her exhibition of 2007, Bureau of Refugees, evokes the establishment after the Civil War of the US Bureau of Freedom, Refugees, and Abandoned Lands, for the benefit of displaced white people as well as formerly enslaved black people. She has sometimes projected images in a way that recalls the cycloramas or dioramas of nineteenth-century American exhibition history. The press release for the Sikkema Jenkins exhibition takes off from the American carnival huckster tone:

Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to present The most Astounding and Important Painting of the fall Art Show viewing season!

Collectors of Fine Art will Flock to see the latest Kara Walker offerings, and what is she offering but the Finest Selection of artworks by an African-American Living Woman Artist this side of the Mississippi. Modest collectors will find her prices reasonable, those of a heartier disposition will recognize Bargains! Scholars will study and debate the Historical Value and Intellectual Merits of Miss Walker’s Diversionary Tactics. Art Historians will wonder whether the work represents a Departure or a Continuum. Students of Color will eye her work suspiciously and exercise their free right to Culturally Annihilate her on social media. Parents will cover the eyes of innocent children. School Teachers will reexamine their art history curricula. Prestigious Academic Societies will withdraw their support, former husbands and former lovers will recoil in abject terror. Critics will shake their heads in bemused silence. Gallery Directors will wring their hands at the sight of throngs of the gallery-curious flooding the pavement outside. The Final President of the United States will visibly wince. Empires will fall, although which ones, only time will tell.

In an essay in The Ecstasy of St. Kara (2016), Walker says that the Twitter hashtag #blacklivesmatter has become “shorthand for a kind of race fatigue” that comes from the repeated stories of a documented police shooting followed by a protest that then produces no indictments. In a “nihilistic age,” maybe “nothing really matters.”

Her slave history is also that of the US in the pictorial heritage she uses, starting with Auguste Edouart’s silhouettes made during his travels to Boston, New York, and New Orleans. Walker reproduces Edouart’s “John’s Funny Story to Mary the Cook,” from A Treatise on Silhouette Likenesses (1835), in her book After the Deluge: A Visual Essay by Kara Walker (2007), about the crisis of Hurricane Katrina. It shows a black male figure in high collar and tails, a coachman perhaps, in animated monologue to a thickset white woman holding a saucepan and spoon before a hearth. They are human beings, not caricatures.

What might have made some people uneasy about Walker’s work at first was that her black people in silhouette come from the racist caricatures of American illustration. These are not sculptural, aestheticized shades dancing in an Aaron Douglas mural. Black art or black artists were supposed to restore the dignity and assert the beauty of black people. But Walker will deal in exaggerated features and kinky hair, in the black as grotesque. They are not pretty. Elizabeth Hardwick said that when she was growing up in Lexington, Kentucky, in the 1920s, she heard white people say they couldn’t understand why black people would want photographs of themselves. The carnage in Walker’s work asks white people: What’s so pretty about you?

Moreover, for all the violence, her black people are not victims. They are casualties or among the fallen, but not powerless, because her images comprise an army of the unlikely, those grotesques and comics that white people invented in the effort to persuade themselves—and black people as well—that black people were only fit for servitude, and that they were incapable of and uninterested in revolt. Walker turns against whiteness what white people invented. Those funny faces have come back to kill Massa. They aren’t so funny anymore, and Walker’s work in the Sikkema Jenkins exhibition has a wild, retaliatory air.

Some of the new works are very large, and you wonder where she could have found such huge sheets of paper. They are not cartoons (in spite of the title of that portrait of a black woman in headscarf and earrings); they don’t feel as though she means to suggest a studio of preparatory drawings. Black and white, ink and collage on paper, is the finished state. Most of the black figures in these new works are not in silhouette. She has shades of black and gray, hints of yellow, blue, and red, and sometimes there are backgrounds of brown. Walker is a superb draftsman. In the towering Christ’s Entry into Journalism, dozens and dozens of figures spiral out from the center. The black figures—heads, torsos, running men, women in hats—seem to come from different eras and circumstances of black representation, here satire, there ethnography, folklore, over there the black leader, black sports figure, or black singer, and those lips look like they came from Disney’s Jungle Book film, or her neck has that Jazz Age fashion magazine vibe.

I have heard viewers compare Christ’s Entry into Journalism to James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888), in the Getty Museum, and Benjamin Robert Haydon’s Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem (1820), in the Athenaeum of Ohio, and maybe so—if the point is that the reactions of spectators depicted in the painting are intended to affirm the reality of the Messiah. In Walker’s painting, the figures swirl around the center: a riot cop, maybe white, is about to bring a chicken leg down on a masked creature; a naked black man who resembles a harlequin has a sword by his side; behind him a Confederate soldier is wielding a dagger. White men rape or sport erections; a white woman brandishes an umbrella; a James Brown–like singer does a move with a microphone; a devil is stealing away a partially mummified black man in a tie; a flapper, not necessarily white, carries on a platter the head of a black youth in a hoodie. But it’s not certain which black figure at the center is the Christ figure: the black man kneeling in chains—the long echo of the design Josiah Wedgwood created for an antislavery medallion in 1787—or the naked black woman being borne away, or even the dark black—mannequin?—with her arm raised in valediction, and an equally dark black man immediately behind her with what looks like a protest sign.

The Pool Party of Sardanapalus (after Delacroix, Kienholz), also very big, has an Assyrian king floating in his cloud, detached from the violence around him. Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) is sexy; the concubines are nude, and the men killing them are seminude. In Walker’s revision, a naked black man is being stabbed by a white woman in a corset; a white man has his hands on a black man from behind and appears to be urging him to stab the naked black figure in front of him. But the center of Walker’s dynamic composition is a white man’s foot and the ropes around it. You follow the lines out in three different directions to black women in bikinis pulling firmly. Then you find the white man, most of his clothes off, being held down by black women and disemboweled. A naked white man lies with his face in a pool of blood; a black woman in a beach cap berates a white man’s back with a heavy branch. It’s not clear what is going on between the interracial couple at the top; at the opposite end a black youth in a do-rag rests on an elbow and smokes what you hope is reefer, but the whole is fearsomely kinetic, and Walker tells us in the title that she also had in mind something like Ed Kienholz’s sculpture of a policeman beating a black rioter.

Violence is a secret held by swamps in works such as Dredging the Quagmire (Bottomless Pit) or Spooks. Dead bodies are to be violated in Paradox of the Negro Burial Ground, Initiates with Desecrated Body, and The (Private) Memorial Garden of Grandison Harris, a work done in oil stick, ink, and paper collage on linen that refers to the slave trained by the Georgia Medical College to rob graves. Some of the paintings seem to portray how old and tired American racism has become: the rebel flags are as tattered as the laundress is tired, the branches have no leaves, whites and blacks are shoeless, stuck in backcountry folklore. It’s hard to read the expression on the face of a black woman who is washing, rather harshly it seems, the back of a white woman in A Piece of Furniture for Jean Leon Gerome. The article of furniture must be the sculpture of a black head on which the white woman sits. Walker’s response to, say, Gérôme’s Moorish Bath (1870), in which a black woman seems solicitous of a hunched-over white woman, may lie in the aggression with which the black woman in her drawing washes the white woman.

Walker’s titles set the mood, but they also set you up, and the texts of her catalogs can be intimidating in their pretended didacticism. A medium-size work done in ink and collage, Scraps, is one of the images that linger in the mind long after you have seen it. Walker shows a naked young black girl in a bonnet, with a small ax raised in her left hand. She is making off with the large head of a white man. She might even be skipping. This isn’t Judith; it’s a demented Topsy in her festival of gore. Slavery drove both the slaver and the enslaved mad and itself was a form of madness. It’s the look Walker puts in the little girl’s visible eye. Racial history has broken free and is running amuck. But even this work has a strange elegance. She is not an exorcist, is not trying to be therapeutic. It is the way she fills up her spaces. With Walker you feel that everything is placed with delicacy and each gesture conveys so much.

I sometimes find myself remembering the great Sphinx of white sugar that Kara Walker built three years ago in an unused, emptied-out sugar refinery in Brooklyn along the East River: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. The refinery was enormous, the walls streaked with sugar. In the distance, the large figure of a Mammy rested in her Egyptian pose, a bandana on her head. The small basket-carrying boys made of dark red molasses who attended her were melting in the summer heat, folding over onto the floor. The large and roving crowd was quiet, as if under a spell. People took photographs of themselves standing between her creamy-looking arms.

The Harlem Renaissance journalist J.A. Rogers said that before the Sphinx lost her face she was a black woman. He cited the writings of an eighteenth-century traveler, the Comte de Volney, as his source. Everyone thought he was crazy. Kara Walker didn’t need either source, and as you walked around the rear of the Mammy figure, maybe expecting a big fig leaf or a blank, neutral area, there were the folds of a huge vulva. It was beautiful that Walker had not lost her nerve.

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