What Shall I Do with These Memories?

by Samuel Hux (November 2016)

What indeed? We humans are so time-bound: trapped in Past-Present-Future. The Future is not here yet but will be when this fraction of a second we call the Present passes into the Past. When we wonder what will be we are not reflecting on what is at this vanishing present second: we are wondering how different or similar things will be compared to what has been. Which means most of our conscious life is about the Past, the longest thing we have. To an extraordinary degree, then, My Life is my Memories.

But they are so incorrect, these memories, by the standards of Proper Think, as will shortly be obvious. Nonetheless, I am fond of contemplating them, these specifically.

I came of age in a small city in eastern North Carolina, the county seat, to which the family moved when I was five. Before that we lived on my maternal grandparents’ farm five or six miles away on “Holland’s Road.” (I didn’t know it by that name, my mother’s maiden name, until many decades later when, rifling through a used-book table in mid-town Manhattan, I picked up a copy of a road-map, the only such item there, and was stunned to see it was of that county—Pitt—in North Carolina. I purchased it of course and, sad to confess, I have since lost it, like so much else.) 

My pre-school years were Southern-mythic: in retrospect it seems I might have been written by William Faulkner. According to my mother, when as an infant I had trouble digesting food, and there being no Gerber’s available, an elderly black woman who worked in my grandmother’s kitchen chewed the victuals for me and then spooned them into my mouth. Told of this years later I was so charmed by the story that I failed to ask my mother why she didn’t do the chewing herself. Just another southern contradiction incomprehensible to those who just know in right-thinking certainty what the South must have been like. My playmate—really my keeper I suppose—was a black kid named Doot, perhaps five years older than I, from whom I could not bear to suffer separation. Doot, who lived on the farm as a member of a share-cropper family, was already in school, so I would follow him and play in the schoolyard until school was out and walk back to the farm with him. It was years before I realized that the memory I spelled “D-o-o-t” must have been short for Deuteronomy. In any case he was soon out of my life when we moved from the farm, although my father would for years remind me of my first friendship. But the idyll was over. Faulkner gave way to normality, or perhaps banality.

All of this made my school years emptier the months my father was away, so that his returns I still recall as some of the happiest days of my life. Although a small-time operator of no significant achievement, he was a romantic figure to me. Dayton, Tennessee, was the site of the Monkey Trial circus, but when I learned of it in school I knew my father had as a young man been there. I loved him without reservation, I’m not embarrassed to say. Freud is an intellectual hero of mine, but the Oedipus Complex remains to me an interesting chapter in the history of ideas with no personal application. He was a handsome man: a full head of grey hair with never a hint of balding, pleasant smile and strong features, lean—Spencer Tracy could have been his stockier brother. I have never known a more attractive man, put the physical and characterological together. Men admired him and women adored him. He was probably a feminist’s nightmare, calling all women “Sugar”: it was as if he assumed the responsibility of making waitresses feel like a million dollars.

I am trying to suggest to you a home and familial atmosphere that, while a constituent platoon in a racist society, was not totally benighted. And I am suggesting this in order to deny myself as much credit as I can for where these memories tend. I had become “Little Max,” a perfectly normal southern boy for that time, so it was no surprise that I thought of blacks as what I would never have called Doot. So once at dinner—I must have been about ten—I referred to my mother’s some-time helper Big Helen as “just a nigger.” My father stood up, leaned over the table, and slapped me out of my chair. “Don’t talk like white trash!” he said. I was lucky he had the presence of mind to hit me with his left hand. He’d had his right amputated after a printing-press accident when yet short of twenty and wore over his wrist a U-shaped piece of steel covered by a leather case. (He used it as a hammer when we built a garage together.) This preface is longer than the conclusions to follow. Well, that’s life. By which I mean that one’s life is always preface to any single significant experience.

I confess that I know I am being consciously provocative: let me let you know that I know that I am walking on the edge, a white Southerner (although living in the North since his mid-twenties) venturing opinions about the American experience of race which may offend racist and conventional right-thinker alike. Why do I do it? In part because I have been instructed by William James in the ethics of disputation. In his classic essay “The Dilemma of Determinism” James says he prefers to use the rather pejorative word chance rather than the eulogistic freedom in order to stack the deck against himself so that if his anti-determinism argument succeeds the success will have been earned. (Imagine—not James’s example—an abortion proponent who calls his position “pro-fetus-killing” instead of “pro-choice.”) So—in this spirit, as it were—I choose to be a bit obnoxious, not wishing to win the reader over through my irresistible native charm. And in part because I am convinced that most of what has been written about race in the U.S. is next to worthless if not all the way there, especially, I am afraid, that written by the right-thinking. Not that that written by the classical racist is worthy—it’s just that his certainties are clearly unworthy while the right-thinker’s are unclearly so. Like an adverb, which can be dropped practically anywhere in a sentence, the remarks immediately to follow don’t have to be dropped precisely here, but this is as good a place as any, so I herewith get them off my mind and between the reader and his endorsement of my views. A kind of challenge.

This is not to suggest for a moment that I think there is or was some unconscious yearning for “them good old slavery days,” not even by the Davenports’ host. But it is to say—and I repeat—when most contemporary commentators (with notable exceptions such as Shelby Steele) talk about race “we usually don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.” I suspect that what we need, to use Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s old phrase, is “benign neglect.” I don’t have to understand, we don’t have to understand, all the variables in the history of race in this nation in order to practice decency toward one another. To think that such behavior cannot occur without complete comprehension of where this culture has been is delusional. Enough. Basta. Genug. This is not the last time that I will say that the last thing we need is a “national discourse on race.” That would/will do no more than give a stage to pontificating liberals and professional race-hustlers.

Which makes some talk about reparations irrelevant, such as “The Case for Reparations” in the June 2014 Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates (the new James Baldwin according to Toni Morrison), a work that can do no more than fracture and confuse relations between blacks and whites.  Coates’s historical presentation of the facts of racial injustice in American history well into our own times is clear and compelling, and the reader will learn a lot, even about some real-estate practices he probably has little grasp of. But this is all in service of the article’s purpose, as the title has it, the case for reparations—and Coates prefers to ignore the fact that reparations are in fact precisely what affirmative action programs are intended to be. Since financial payments to the African-American population are not likely by a long shot to occur, the only likely results of his insistence on their justification is to make blacks feel cheated and whites feel they are viewed as no good sons of bitches. What a happy future! Coates’s clinching argument, the healthy addition to the Israeli economy through German reparations payments, is as misguided as he thinks it a bang-up unanswerable so-there! It is another instance of an inability, or a refusal, to tell the difference between a nation trying to make up for past injustices, and succeeding to a remarkable degree, and a nation taking responsibility for its parents’ governors committing a one-third successful genocide of a transnational ethno-religious group—that is, murdering one third of the world’s Jews. We need contributions like this to a national discourse on race like a hole in the head.

The same could be said of Coates’s celebrated book, Between the World and Me, which The Atlantic has been kind enough to excerpt as “Letter to My Son” (September 2015), the magazine’s kindness, quite unintentionally, lying in the fact that it saves the reader from wasting quite as much time (unless the reader is a damned fool) on an unreadable screed (unless the reader confuses the cozy feeling of enjoying the tone of avant-garde bravery with reading). The book is a fraud from the get-go, no letter to anyone’s son, but a pseudo-poetic prose rant against “those Americans who believe that they are white” (a trope lifted from Baldwin) and, to be as blunt as possible, a racist implication of black superiority. Not an argument, I should say—for an argument requires a series of connected intelligent (or at least intelligible) statements, not a series of ostensibly provocative metaphors which neither expand nor clarify meaning, as in “This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence. It contributed to the fast breakdown of our bodies.” 

Seldom seeing the Washington Post and no longer a habitual reader of the New York Times (how liberating), I have to trust Christopher Caldwell (The Weekly Standard, 8/17/2015) that a Post writer announced that “Coates has won that title [America’s foremost ‘public intellectual’] for himself, and it isn’t even close,” and that a Times staffer judged Coates’s book thus: “’Must read’ doesn’t even come close. This from @tanehisicoates is essential, like water and air.” Sycophants. Coates is so intelligent (I am sure he is).  .  . and so sensitive, this “public intellectual” who is unmoved by the deaths of police and fireman who died 9/11 at the World Trade Center. Despicable.

With such people we are to have “a national discourse on race”? No thank you. I prefer to contemplate my memories.

 

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Samuel Hux is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at York College of the City University of New York. He has published in Dissent, The New Republic, Saturday Review, Moment, Antioch Review, Commonweal, New Oxford Review, Midstream, Commentary, Modern Age, Worldview, The New Criterion and many others.

 

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