Africana

Dear Gerald:

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You're absolutely right--it may be a long time until we see anything like Africana again. Even if I'd been able to throw it at my television--just lifting it violates the instructions my orthopedist gave me last week concerning my arthritic shoulder--I wouldn't have, and not just because I like football, baseball, and AMC. Africana is as least as good as the two or three other encyclopedias of black history and culture that sit in storage while I wait for my shoulder to heal enough so I can build bookshelves.

At the same time, though, admitting that I need to keep Africana because it's all we have right now is too much like how some older folk I know feel about Ebony and BET (which, one wag I know quips, stands for the Brothers' Excuse for Television). In their heart of hearts, they know neither is really very good, but they nonetheless can't resist claiming pride of ownership.

Still, in the spirit of fairness, before I get back to beating the boy, I have to list a few things I like about Africana. The brief essay on Kathleen Conwell--also known as Kathleen Collins--acknowledges a filmmaker who deserves wider recognition. She was also a playwright and a novelist, but I like best her film Losing Ground. When I was still editing Black Film Review, the magazine I founded (shameless plug!), I spent a wonderful two days with her at a film festival in Atlanta. When she died, in 1988, we published a special issue about her. I didn't know her well, of course, but I often think about the two hours we spent talking that afternoon so long ago.

It's also good to see documentary filmmaker St. Clair Bourne here, though I wonder why Donald Bogle--a pioneer in black film studies--isn't. (That's another one of those glaring omissions that make you wonder whether the editors of Africana didn't really have an agenda after all.) And I like the entries on countries in Africa and the Black Diaspora and the accompanying "ready references" summarizing demographic and economic data about those countries. I spent much of last year tutoring one of my godsons--if we'd had Africana then, we wouldn't have had to leave my house to walk around to the library.

That's both the strength and the weakness of Africana, that it provides so much information in such a truncated form. Like you, I wish Gates and Appiah had taken the time to compile a truly comprehensive encyclopedia. If you must have monuments to validate your worth as a people, then build lasting ones.

At the heart of my criticism, though, is my conviction that our experience as blacks and Americans--like any human experience--is just too complex to be summarized. More and more, since I quit reviewing books, I think that's the job of fiction. Andre Schwartz-Bart's The Last of the Just (for example) is a far more moving evocation of the Holocaust than any account in any reference work, because it focuses on the experiences of one man--a man who, if he continues to deny his Jewishness, has a reasonable chance of escaping the death camps. Jim McPherson's stories have something of the same power. They, too, bring representative individual experience alive, and McPherson confronts the places where things intersect, then reports on what he finds.

When I look at our place in American history, though, what intrigues me are the missed opportunities--as when, for example, legal and societal distinctions were first made between white indentured servants and black slaves. I'm also intrigued by the contradictions. A few months back, black and Native Americans at a West Coast conference took each other to task over the role of the Buffalo Soldiers in the opening of the West. I'd like to have been there for that one!

I'd like to have seen some evidence in Africana of our humanity and resourcefulness, the kind of thing you find in the work of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, both of whom were, if memory serves correctly, Henry Louis Gates' mentors. Remember how Robert Penn Warren tells Albert Murray in South to a Very Old Place that slavery "was also a human thing ... not to say humane" and so "every possible, every imaginable combination of human social relationships is likely to exist. And did exist." [Italics original.] Where is that kind of insightful and original thinking in Africana?

Which isn't at all to excuse or make apologies for slavery, of course, but only to argue that our collective memory needs to include men like Robert Harlan, Justice Harlan's half-brother (or cousin, depending on which biographer you believe), who was educated by his master, escaped to California, made a fortune in the gold fields, returned to Kentucky and bought his freedom, then moved to England to race horses. Or the mulatto barber and real estate magnate of antebellum Natchez (I can't remember his name, but remember, my books are in storage). He was freed by his father, then became wealthy enough to lend money to prominent whites. He was killed in a dispute over timber by a Pamunkey Indian from Virginia who would have been considered black in Virginia but escaped prosecution because he was considered white in Mississippi.

I feel like I'm rambling here, and with more than 800 words written, I haven't even gotten round to responding to your points about the responsibility of the black intellectual. Like you, I wish Gates and Cornel West would take sabbaticals and embark on the kind of lasting work they're both capable of. And there's an interesting paradox here with Africana: Gates is probably the only black intellectual in America with the charisma and clout to get it published. The work itself, alas!, is solid and workmanlike, nothing like what I think we have the right to expect from the sage of Cambridge.

Take care. It was a pleasure working with you.

David

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This week, a discussion of Africana, the encyclopedia and CD-ROM edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Anthony Appiah (click hereto buy it). Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis. He is currently completing a book about Fisk University and an anthology about Sammy Davis Jr. David Nicholson is a Washington writer.

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