An Oprah Reading Fantasy (Black History Month - Part 3)

At this point  I suppose no one needs to heap praise upon or call further attention to Oprah Winfrey.

Who is this woman? Just one of the best known people on the planet, that's all.

Yet, as I conclude this series on Black History Month, I would like to point to Oprah as one of the few celebrities who manages to deliver to us a valuable paradox.

Oprah is not a case of "what you see is what you get." Think about it. Here is a person who comes to the us via the borders defined by a box and moves around with complete comfort and ease in that medium, She is so successful in the realm of the glowing rectangle that she has virtually owned daytime TV for decades.

Nevertheless it is Oprah who has been using television to tell us that we, in effect, need to turn off our TVs. She reminds us that we are missing out on something huge if we don't shun the "boob tube" from time to time and make room in our lives to read more books.

A while ago Oprah devoted an entire issue of her magazine to books and authors. One can see: this is someone who takes reading very seriously.

                          

FINDING THE FREEDOM...TO READ
If I keep unwrapping the mystery of Oprah, I find a further paradox. The woman who loves reading so very much that she had constructed a personal library to die for has a very different story lurking in her background. As an African-American, Oprah is a descendant of slaves. One of the strongest prohibitions that slaves lived with was that they were not allowed to learn how to read.

The slave masters understood. Access to books could begin to erode their power structure. Ignorant slaves were the most malleable. Books, by contrast, taught a man or a woman how to think for himself. They delivered identity. Books could become keys and gateways to freedom.

Frederick Douglass

In the famous Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, American Slave, the author notes that, " it is almost an unpardonable offence to teach slaves to read in this Christian country," but Douglass got around this high wall when his "kindly" Mistress taught him the alphabet.

He took those 26 letters and literally ran with them.

Douglass tells how as he went on errands for the master he took a book with him and got the white children in the neighborhood to give him informal lessons in reading. And his eyes were opened...

Douglass was born in 1818. Nearly two hundred years later Oprah Winfrey, born in a world that no longer withholds literacy from anyone, asks all of us to remember what reading can do for us. At the same time, the pressures not to read books increase.

We're busy. We spend hours on the Internet doing casual, superficial reading of emails, Facebook posts, websites, and yes, blogs. And if we finally wish to turn our attention to a full-blown narrative, it's easier and faster to pop a DVD into the Blu-ray player than to crack the cover of a book.

I think Oprah understands what's happening. With her Book Club she has not only performed the role formerly played by influential critics and teachers who singled out works that everyone should read, she has also tried to create a culture of reading. She promotes the idea that one can enjoyably and profitably gather with friends who are reading the same book and discuss it.

TOLSTOY AT 30,000 FEET

Advocating the idea of reading these days is like trying to roll a rock up a steep hill. Will the rock make it to the crest or will it roll down upon us? I honestly don't know. Reading may become more and more a niche activity that goes through frequent bursts of revival (like knitting) and at the same time never reclaims the more thoroughgoing popularity it had, say, at the height of the paperback revolution in the 1950s. That was before television and movies began to siphon away the mass audience.

I suspect that without Oprah things would be worse. Fewer people would be reading and many books she's brought to their attention over the years would be vastly neglected.

I think of the time a few years ago when I was on an airplane and I saw a woman reading a thick trade paperback of my all-time favorite novel.

Anna Karenina.

Who on earth would be reading Count Tolstoy's masterpiece? It's rarely studied even in college. It's too long and perhaps not obtuse enough for lit professors who think wrestling with "difficulty" is the purpose of their discipline.

Then I saw the sticker on the front cover and I understood: A.K. was an Oprah Book Club Selection.

OPRAH AT THE DOOR...
How remarkable are the twists and turns of history. I can imagine Oprah, this descendant of those who were forbidden to read, paying a visit today to the white-washed, stately, suburban home of the great, great, great, great grandchildren of those who owned the slaves. Just after dinner she rings their door bell.

Ding-dong! Very sonorous and impressive! But...

When no one answers, Oprah shyly opens the door and looks around. No wonder no one heard the doorbell. Inside the white-washed, stately, suburban home the parents and four children are:

• Playing video games
• Watching TVs and movies on high definition screens.
• Noodling around at their computers.
• Texting on their phones

Oprah looks about, shakes her head, and at last speaks.

"What's wrong with all of you? Why aren't you reading?"

And it's true. There are shelves in the house, but on them rest knick knacks and DVDs. Other than some obscure tomes obviously chosen for their decorative cachet, there isn't a book in sight.

The family hears the commotion as Oprah strides through the house, moving from room to room. Each, in turn, looks at her, noting the strong voice in their midst, but their eyes remain vacuous, unfocused.

"Don't you get it?" Oprah shouts. "You've all become slaves!"

In desperation she places a stack of Book Club books on the dining room table where perhaps the family will stumble upon them the next time they sit down to eat their microwave meals. Then she departs and tries the house next door...

The family members in the white-washed, stately, suburban home turn back to their individual screens and diversions. I'm sorry to report that hour after hour the loudest sound in the house is the clanking of chains. If you've ever been around slaves, then you know the harsh truth. You can only free those who actually want to be free. Not even Oprah Winfrey can change that. - V.W.



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Clifford Brown, A Life in Jazz (Black History Month - Part 2)

Life is odd. Horrible things can happen (like my ancestors owning human beings as slaves, see previous VWP post), but from such horrible things sometimes quite different states of being emerge. Unambiguously good things.

Like jazz.

If African-Americans had never been loaded aboard slave ships and brought to a distant land, if they had remained just what they were, Africans, who would have invented this most American of music?

And without jazz I wouldn't be telling the story of quite likely the greatest and least known trumpeter of all time.

Clifford Brown.

MY MUSICAL MELANGE
Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Tchaikovsky. This was the music I grew up with. My father wanted his sons to be exposed to the best of culture, and in the Western world, European classical music was considered to be at the pinnacle of the human effort to turn instruments and notes into compelling sounds.

My first musical love...classical music.

Our father purchased stacks of RCA and Columbia Masterwork records at what happened to be a propititious moment. He could still get his boys' attention by dropping the needle on, say, a Rachmaninoff piano concerto.

A few years later, though, the British Invasion of rock 'n' roll roared ashore in America. Our ears tuned into a new sound. Goodbye, Ludwig. Roll over, Beethoven!

Oh, I still liked, even loved, classical music, but it took a backseat in my musical interests. Rock music was so much more dashboard and steering wheel direct. For starters it was louder and the singers sang words about what was on their minds.

Classical music, on the other hand, was more of an extended impression of a feeling, that gradually unfolded and shaped the listener's soul over time. Why a symphony might require an entire forty minutes of listening! Rock music tended to serve up three-minutes doses of sound that gouged, carved, and stomped the psyche in satisfying ways.

If classical music was courtship and seduction and love letters written back and forth, rock music was a vivid one-night stand, a sudden jolt of a drug to the head...

But where was jazz in those days? Actually, we were living in the golden age of it, the late 1950s and early 1960s, but I had no idea. I heard jazz, in a degraded or altered form, and no one told me that was what it was.

Call it jazz...because it sorta is.

Jazz was in Henry Mancini's "Pink Panther Theme". It was in every other note of the elevator music of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. It was even in the only instrumental The Beatles ever wrote, the blues inflected "Flying" on their Magical Mystery Tour album, and in the lonely saxophone wail of "Us and Them" on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

And why was it I loved the massed brass, and most of all the horn solos, when I sat down and listened to the Blood, Sweat and Tears album or one of those classic numbered double albums by Chicago--I, II and III?

I was starting to hear the music I was destined to fall in love with.

JAZZ TRUMPET'S MISSING LINK
Decades later I probably listen to more jazz on a daily basis than any other kind of music. I'm no jazz expert, but I like how jazz shares with classical music the idea of being a musical impression of an emotion. I like too how, unlike classical, the musicians have the freedom to solo and display their technical virtuosity as well as express how they're feeling while the tune progresses.

I'm still making discoveries in jazz. Like the trumpeter Clifford Brown aka "Brownie."

For me it's like finding out that between Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms there was another equally great composer, but somehow I never heard of him until now.

Of course, anyone who is very conversant in jazz will have heard of Brownie, but the casual jazz listener not so much. In fact, no one even assayed a book-length biography of the man until 2001.

It's not that Clifford Brown didn't have the chops to match Miles Davis. He did and then some. It's not that he didn't play with the greats of his time like Art Blakey, Max Roach, and Sonny Rollins, He did. It's that he died young. Way too young.

Brownie was just getting started.

ON THE CUSP (OF GREATNESS)

It is the summer of '56 and it is Clifford Brown's wedding anniversary. Normally he and his wife LaRue travel from gig to gig together. They have a baby this year and they would even bring the baby along.

In those days the jazz musician typically traveled by car. It's a hard way to make a living even if you're 25-year-old Clifford Brown who is seen by critics as the next great jazz star. He already has an album whose title sum up the possibilities:

New Star on the Horizon.

Brownie doesn't take wife LaRue and baby Clifford, Jr. on the trip on June 25, 1956. LaRue goes to her mother's house because she had never met her grandson. And it is her birthday. Yes, she and Clifford had married on her birthday two years earlier.

The birthday party is being held at the home of saxophonist Harold Land and his wife. Land isn't in the current incarnation of the Clifford Brown quartet, but he remains a close friend. Someone comes over and says there's a call for LaRue at her mother's house down the street.

THE NIGHT THE MUSIC DIED
Brownie has been playing at Music City, a jazz club in Philadelphia. After the show the band packs up, drummer Max Roach and Sonny "Newk" Rollins, the saxophonist in one car. Brownie travels with his pianist Richie Powell (younger brother of the great pianist Bud Powell) and Richie's wife in the other car. They hit the road, caravan style, Roach and Rollins in the lead car.

The band is headed to Chicago for more music making. Brownie and the Powells are riding in Brownie's 1955 Buick.

It is raining as June 25 heads toward June 26, 1956.

After midnight, Brownie's car stops off on the Pennsylvania Turnpike near Bedford, PA to buy gas. It's the last time Brownie and the Powells are seen alive.

Nancy Powell, who is now driving, misses a curve, smashes through a guardrail, and the car falls down a 75-foot embankment.

The rain continues to fall.

"...BROWN IS BEAUTIFUL." - Kalamu ya Saaam, poet/author
If Clifford Brown had lived, then what? For one thing, I wouldn't be writing a blog post about him in 2011 anymore than there's a need for someone to post about Miles Davis and what a great jazz musician he was. Everyone with even passing familiarity with jazz would know the name.

Brownie's solo for "Daahoud"

Brownie only had five years in which he recorded and played and positioned himself in the forefront of the future of jazz. It is an amazing accomplishment that is validated by the recordings. Sometimes Brownie's playing is, no other way to put it, jaw dropping the way you listen to a Charlie Parker sax solo and wonder how any human can have the breath and finger speed to produce such sounds. Other times, with the riotous bebop pushed to the background and replaced by a ballad, Brownie is simply moving and soulful.

He could do it all. Always his horn playing is impeccable and intelligent and commands my attention.

But there's one more thing that's always mentioned about Brownie. In an age when many jazz musicians followed the Charlie Parker model of dissipation--burn bright and burn out young--Brownie was a clean living family man. He didn't touch drugs. He was gentle and kindly. This is not myth making. It's what all those who knew him said upon learning of his death. The world had lost a great jazz musician and a great human being.

CODA? NOT QUITE
There were tapes in the trunk of the 1955 Buick that took Brownie to his death. He liked to record his rehearsals and gigs on his own reel to reel machine. Only one of the tapes was labeled, which means that as the tapes have finally come out on CDs in recent years people are left to guess where and when Brownie is playing. But what really matters is that he is playing. He will keep on playing. That's my definition of classical. - V.W.

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The White Album (Black History Month - Part 1)

Even though we probably don't think of it very often, I'm sure most of us would agree that at least some of today's news derives from what was once news in the past, but we now choose to call it "history."

For example, a "new" military conflict turns out to be just a revival of an ancient war. The animosities and divisions have never been healed.

This month in America happens to be devoted to a study and appreciation of the life and times of African-Americans. I find this fertile soil for my thoughts and dreams as I reside in my Van Winkled state.

You see, there's much that happened back in the early days of America that affects every breath I take today whether I read the headlines or not...

THE FAMILY ALBUMS
Years ago, my grandmother on my father's side took all the faded sepia and black and white photos that had been stashed in an old trunk and shoe boxes and she pasted them onto photo album pages like this...

As I turn the pages I see men with squashed down hats, women in flouncy, long dresses, children with dirty knees and scissor cut hair.

As for these old ones' predecessors, I'm left to guess at their garb and dimensions because they inconveniently lived before the age of the camera. I assume I would see much the same thing as in my photo album, minus the occasional glimpse of a spindly Model T Ford in the background.

White faces. No black faces.

Page after page of just white faces, ...

There's a reason why it's worth remarking the absence of something in these pictures.

A long time ago, I encountered the hard documentary evidence. My family in long ago days owned slaves.

Over 150 years later I think it's necessary and just that I claim those black men, women and children as something more important than the chickens and mules and the dogs and cats that wandered in and out of the barnyard.

They were human beings who shared their lives with my ancestors. They were purchased and then expected to labor and in return they received food and broken down houses to live in and maybe some cast-off clothes.

In their forced degradation, they lived and died alongside my kin. I think that's enough to make them part of my family.

HOW I FOUND OUT
In 1976 my Great Uncle John went to the copy shop and placed on the glass the first page of over 100 carefully typed pages and genealogical charts he had composed in his retirement. When he was finished he mailed copies of the resulting comb-bound, cardboard cover document, entitled In Search of Roots, to my paternal grandparents and each of their siblings. I started reading my father's copy.

My great, great, great grandfather...
ready to go to war for the South.

No surprise, there were no heroes in our family line, no artists, no inventors, not even any sports stars. I was disappointed, but I had to admit that there wouldn't be such a thing as "average" in this world if most people didn't fit that mold. Our family certainly did.

The one thing my ancestors had in common was their Southern heritage. On my great grandmother's side, they were from Kentucky. On my great grandfather's side, the side that gave me my surname, the family locus was Smith County, Tennessee.

From 1861-1865 at least a half dozen men bearing my last name fought, and some of them died, for the Confederate States of America.

These ancestors of mine weren't fighting to hang onto their wealth and a privileged existence such as that of the Southern plantation owner. In my family all of the men had small farms and large families. And, as I learned to my dismay, they had slaves to help them get the work done.

This is when at light bulb illuminated for me: slavery was such a widespread way of life in the southern United States that one didn't have to be rich to own slaves. It was part of agrarian life. Just like you had buckets, wheel barrows, and shovels, you purchased some slaves and they helped work the land.

EVIDENCE

In the age before photography, newspapers printing engravings
of drawings that showed what a slave sale looked like.

One of the first pieces of paper that Great Uncle John found as he began to authenticate where the family was living before the Civil War was a bill of sale for a slave purchased in 1856. Who was this person who was bought and sold by my family? I don't know.

But as my great uncle engaged in further research he unearthed a paper trail of wills that offered up a treasure trove of names.

In 1845 in Smith County one of my ancestors bequeathed to his wife "the tract of land whereon I now live & the following negroes..."

Their names were...

James, Adam and Sisley.

The will continues in the very same sentence to blandly leave to the wife after these three human beings "two bedsteads and furniture and as much other household & kitchen furniture as may be necessary for her convenient support, also my Black mare and the Toney filly and as much of my stock of cattle, hogs, sheep, and farming tools as will be necessary for her to have."

In the eyes of the law, and my distant relations, James, Adam and Sisley were property, just like kitchen furniture and the hogs.

That noted, the will isn't finished yet with disposing of the slaves...

Item four offers a bequest to a grand daughter named Elizabeth of "my negro girl by the name of Mary."

Item six bequeaths to a son Henderson upon the death of his mother "my negro man James and woman Sisley & hur (sic) increase from this time."

Item seven bequeaths to a son Sanders "my negro boy Andy, and at the death of his mother my negro man Adam."

I'm getting depressed reading and thinking about this, but I'm not quite to the end yet.

In item eight daughter Frances is to receive "my negro girl Cinthy and I have a negro boy by the name of Hillard that is afflicted and if he gets well I wish him to remain in my family..."


ANOTHER WILL
In 1863, while the War Between the States raged on, the aforementioned Henderson who had received James and Sisley from his father, sat down and wrote his will in "a low state of health but in sound memory..."

After bequeathing 280 acres of land to his wife he added "all my Negroes (to wit) Gim, Sisley, Alexander, Suix, Em, and my interest in Harry the Blacksmith," then goes on in the same sentence to dispense "horses, cattle, hogs, sheep, household and kitchen furniture, and farming tools."

What names might have gone with these faces toiling in the field?

KENTUCKY PROGRESSIVES
A slightly kinder picture emerges from the will written by a maternal ancestor living in Casey County, Kentucky in 1848.

She lists her slaves: Mary, Rose, Eliza, Hiram, Robert, Malinda, Reuben, Oliver, Mack, Barnett, James, John, Sampson, Mariah, Mary, Elizabeth, Sally, Francis and Josephine...and then she provides that after her death they be hired out for five years and then the heirs shall...

A new home for freed slaves?

"constitute a general fund for the benefit of all my slaves...and (they) and their increase are to be free upon the condition they remove to Africa...settling them in Liberia or any other African colony to which they may desire to emigrate and which will be be open for the Emigration of Free persons of Color."

Were Mary, Rose, Eliza, Hiram, Malinda, Reuben, Oliver, Mack, Barnett, James, John, Sampson, Mariah, Mary, Elizabeth, Sally, Francis and Josephine ever given their freedom? Did they make the long journey to Africa? If so, did they survive and thrive?

I don't know. It's a family mystery.

ONLY ONE THING I WANT TO SAY
Yes, I'm sorry that my ancestors owned slaves and actually did so with free consciences because they honestly didn't believe people from Africa were fully human. But there's a bit more to be sorry for.

What happened after the Civil War when those slaves were freed was far from an automatic redress of past wrongs.

My father still remembers a succession of "colored" people who were in his life, including some who lived in a shack out at the edge of the farm. Supposedly they were now "free," but life remained adamantly hardscrabble. They helped out by performing chores, including hauling water from the well  a long distance to the farmhouse. They left when my father's father decided he ought to charge them some rent. The shack they were living in was turned into a chicken coop.

White Southerners at the time liked to point out bright spots in race relations. I suppose one came in the form of several black women who cared for my father when he was young. The first was Ida who actually wore a maid's uniform. He doesn't remember Ida, but he says somewhere there is a picture, now lost, of him and Ida sitting on the porch. How I wish I could have found that one spot of non-whiteness in our family album!

Then there was Susie Lacy. My father remembered her very well, including her husband with the unusual name of Clearview Lacey. Susie made such an impression on him that when my brothers and I were children, he took us back to the farm and drove around looking for something. Off a dirt road he eventually found an old, toothless black woman sitting on the porch of a stack of boards that was supposed to be a house. Yes, Susie remembered him. Wasn't that fine! He'd grown up and had sons of his own. My father gave her some silver dollars and kind words.

What else could he do? Progress in those days when Dr. King was just beginning his sit-ins and marches was slow. My father's father, a kindly Christian farmer, had only recently transitioned from saying the "n" word to "nig-ra." He couldn't quite get himself to say "Negro," though now and then he talked about the "colored folks." I'm sure he died without the word "African-American" ever coming out of his mouth.

Each generation is arguably less racist, but that cannot mend the past. There is no help for James, Adam, Sisley...Mary, Rose, Eliza, Hiram, Robert, Malinda, Reuben, Oliver, Mack, Barnett, James, John, Sampson, Mariah, Mary, Elizabeth, Sally, Francis and Josephine and all the others who crossed paths with my ancestors. They were falsely judged to be dumb and ignorant creatures by people who themselves were ignorant--in a way I can only hope will never happen again. - V.W.

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