The first thing I wanted to ask you is how often you write

Every Day.

For How long?

That depends, sometimes I write two or three sentences and say to hell with it. Nothing’s happening today, Now there are two things -- writing in the head and, I would say writing on the page but in this computer era I guess we have to say writing on the screen. Now the writing in the head, I definitely do every day, thinking about how I want to phrase something or how I’d like to rephrase something I’ve already written. Structuring something I’ve been thinking about for a while... how to put a particular part of an essay or some type of narrative in a different place. Sometimes... you have to break things up. When I’m walking around, I’m thinking those kinds of things out. I don’t know of anybody who literally memorizes everything that they’ve written. There’s probably someone out there who can do that but I have yet to meet them. I have four or five things going on in my head everyday. There’s this miniseries about jazz that I’m thinking about, so I’m thinking about dialogue and who I want to play Billy Eckstine or Charlie Parker. Then I’m thinking about this novel, First Snow in Kokomo the opening and different parts. Then there’s an essay Albert Murray that I want to change slightly it’s gonna go in my next book. Then there’s a collection of short stories and a big essay on Nelson Mandela and the relationship of black Americans to the liberation of South Africa which has never really been investigated. So I’m thinking about these different phrases. When I write one thing, I’ll often be thinking about something completely different.

Do you still write poetry?

No. I mean I have a little file that says P-O-E-T-R-Y and every now and then I’ll put something in there, but I don’t really think in those terms. I took all those things I learned when I was writing that and put it into prose so I get largely the same satisfaction that I got when I did that. But you never know, I might end up trying to sneak back on the field late at night when I think that the enemy can’t see me.

Why do you think it is that a lot of people, off the top of their heads can name maybe a half-dozen black poetry and fiction writers, but so little attention has been paid to people like George Schuyler or Rudolph Fisher in the black prose tradition. For instance, people would mention Ellison as a novelist, way before they would think of him as an essayist.

Well, you know the essay is a special taste... I don’t... I was just thinking about James Baldwin’s Fire Next Time ... I don’t even know if Norman Mailer’s essays sold like that. See, Baldwin is a particular phenomena because on the one hand, the sound he put together which was part Henry James and part rhythms he got from the church and jazz and blues... the sound was really something special. He was so startling to people wen they read him. When you saw him on t.v. he seemed like a slight, bug-eyed, semi-hysterical man and then you would pick up these books and there was this extraordinary, elegant prose style. It’d be like I ... Ben Webster, the great jazz saxophonist was kind of tipsy one night and he could get kind of wild, cussing people out and fighting in bars and then you follow him around the corner and he’d pick up the horn and you’d hear this de-boo-be-booo-woo-woo-weee. And you say, wait a minute, I saw this wild guy over at the bar and now this guy with the tenor saxophone, how do they hook up? Another thing I would say is that the essay is primarily about an idea of some sort organized in the style and form of the writer. If you go to an essay you’re going to get inside somebody’s head. I don’t think that the thinking side of Afro-American writing has been that important to anybody -- black or white.

How so?

Negroes aren’t’ that interested in ideas and neither are white people for that matter. I mean if you’re in a circle of people who are talking about books, that might be the case but if you go to the barbershop, them Negroes ain’t thinking about ideas like that -- nor are these white guys who fill potholes in the West village. Nor are a number of the middle, upper middle class people -- some of whom are Jewish, some of whom are Italian, etc. -- who are in my neighborhood.

The discussion of ideas as opposed to the American narcissistic obsession with what’s going on with the self, that’s the general thing people are talking about. They may be better educated, but they’re not gonna say, like George Schuyler, for instance how would Schuyler fit in a discussion about black American conservatives of this period. He comes out against certain left-wing conceptions and also in support of a right-wing agenda, if you will -- like McCarthyism -- Well, you see, there’s a serious problems that we have with the McCarthy era. There were Communist spies in the United States that were trying to undermined the country. There’s no if, ands or buts about that. The problem we have with talking about that era is that McCarthy was such a nut.

See, McCarthy was our Tawana Brawley. There are black females who suffer abuse at the hands of white men. There have been and there may be one suffering at this very moment but once you get a lie that big, that gets that much attention. the worst thing about the case is that it an cause people to be skeptical about people who really have been abused. You see it in Invisible Man, you see it in Richard Wright’s American Hunger that has the second half of Black Boy. Just like we had as many of our people in their country trying to undermine their stuff and spy on them. It was that kind of war. But you see the other question is this: is it in the interests of black Americans for a foreign power that has no particular interest in us anyway to get the upper hand on the United States? That’s the question that never gets asked. I’m not so sure that it would have done black Americans any good if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War.

There’s a book by Wilson Record called Race and Radicalism which compares the NAACP and The Communist Party’s agenda for Black people. The last sentence is that Negroes were more likely to find their salvation in the Declaration of Independence than in the Communist Manifesto.

A very important thing to read is the introduction that this novelist Josef Svertsky called The Bass Saxophone. It’s a novel but it has an introductory essay that gives you a very interesting picture of Paul Robeson from the standpoint of people in Czechylslovakia. When the Russians brought Robeson through there they were trying to figure out if he knew or didn’t know how oppressed they were by the Russians. They were wheeling him out there and he was singing Negro folk songs. So Svertsky talks about how they went from one dictatorship, the Nazis, to another, the Russians.
I remember very distinctly when I first read Schuyler in American Opinion thirty or thirty-five years ago and I was stunned because I’d never read a black guy who was that vehemently anti-Communist. He was talking about these African communist dictators. At that time it was stunning to see a black guy who wasn’t associated with what was mainstream civil rights. Then when I read Black No More I said this guy thinks really differently. I don’t know that there is anybody out there now who’s famous who you can say really descends from Schuyler. Thomas Sowed is a very different kind of dude, he’s an economist. Shelby Steele? No. None of these people seem to be like him. George Schuyler was like the black Sgt. Preston with the huskies and the whip. When you read Kundera and these other people who lived under communism, Schuyler seems less extreme.

What [Mengistu] did in Ethiopia after he ran Haile Selassie out of there, I mean the guy was a maniac, he slaughtered people. At the very worst points in history like the turn of the century when you have something like 3,000 people being lynched over 23 years, that’s like chump change compared to what you get in these Communist regimes. That doesn’t mean that those redneck kingdoms and racial totalitarianism that was in place and the fact that these people had won the war against the Constitution -- the South lost the shooting war but won the policy war -- they won and it took another ninety years to win the policy war. See, I was born in 1945 and I met my great-grandmother who had been a slave and it was a whole big deal about whether you could go into this store or that one to get a coke, whether they were gonna serve you or not. There was a moment where the almighty dollar did not take precedence over white supremacy, see you or I could buy a building on Park Avenue. If you have sixty million or ninety million, if you have it , you can get a building. But I’ve often wondered how much money was lost by this roadside cafes and diners that didn’t serve black people.

Even with all that, when you compare the body count in Russia from the fall of Nicholas II on forward, I don’t think we have anything that can compare with that. When you look at where Stalin took it, that’s a completely different thing. Our thing was to get the process that was implicit in the social contract working . Our job was not to overthrow the country but to be included in the social contract. That is to achieve our actual birthright which is a very different thing.

I’ve always seen the Civil Rights Amendments and the Thirteenth Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments during Reconstruction as radically reorienting America -- that is making it something it was never intended to be. People say that the civil Rights Movement was about making America live up to its creed, but the movement was actually about overhauling that creed.

Oh yeah, on the one hand a guy like William Buckley argued that you didn’t need those amendments. I in the first essay in All American Skin Game that our social contract allows us to redress through amendments, shortsightedness, and prejudicial policies. The amendment can be a form of social redemption. You redeem yourself by repealing laws, writing new laws, writing amendments. Those things allow a country to adjust to a reality that develops.

A point that I make that a lot of people don’t really get because they think universal humanism is something you inhale. See, the fundamental human attitude is xenophobia. Getting to the pint where the other is not the enemy is a big leap. Because we live in our period, we think people just automatically knew. You go to Africa now an people in one tribe don’t think people in other tribes are human. You’d never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism. People don’t really think other people are the same. The French and Germans hate each other now. They hated each other when Julius Caesar went in there. The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we’d probably go to war.

If you say “I don’t like Puerto Ricans.” you don’t really know any but you don’t like them. the you get a very high paying job where you have to work with them everyday. Unless you’re just a rockhead you’ll begin to discover that there are many different kinds of Puerto Ricans, some you like, some you don’t Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience -- or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence. That’s what these various militias are about. The complexities of life are just too much for them so they say “I know, we need to get rid of the government and then we’ll be O.K.” I think we need to be in the forefront of trying to clarify and reiterate all these ideas that exist in the social contract as I understand it anyway. Not that we’re all gonna agree, but we have many things that we can contribute to this discussion.

One of the things that I try to do in my writing is use what Richard Wright said: “The Negro is America’s metaphor.” I also try to discuss the idea of democracy and the question of what it really means. As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don’t deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that. In fact, almost not at all. So that’s where I am.

A thing I find interesting is that at the same time that the humanist ethic you’re talking about was taking root in Europe the idea of race was being developed which defined us outside the confines of those principles. I also think that racism is a dynamic process. Instead of working against the country, as you suggest, it actually helped hold it together.

That’s Winthrop Jordan’s argument in white over black.

Exactly. And it brings to mind the essay you wrote “Dumb Bell Blues,” which attacks Derrick Bell for asserting that racism is permanent.

That wasn’t exactly the thing I was after with him. What bothered me was the impact that the Derrick Bell’s have on the minds of young black people -- and young white people. Its very psychologically injurious for young people to see a guy with Derrick Bells’ credentials and background to stand up in front of them and tell them “ You can forget it.” These white folks in power ain’t gonna let you do this and they ain’t gonna let you do that. You might as well not get out of bed in the morning -- which is his essential message. The problem I have is that I’m sitting next to this guy on the panel -- and he was clean. I’m looking at this beautiful chalk gray suit he had on that cost about $1,200 -- then he got up and started talking this stuff. I’m not trying to reduce the complexity of the world to the Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur level of materialism, but what I meant was that he was tailored like someone who was a success. And to then watch him go into this thing was startling.

I said to myself, there’s something wrong with this. For me having been involved with Friends of SNCC and CORE 35 years ago, we’d be talking with guys from Mississippi back then who weren’t as pessimistic as they are now. They were organizing people. These were guys who wore overalls and brogans. So to hear that from him was the height of irresponsibility. If you’re gonna say that these guys are not gonna just roll over and die, then that’s true. If you’re gonna say that those who have absolute power in certain arenas are not gonna be anxious to share it if , that if you have something that really threatens the structure that they’re not gonna just let you walk away easily. The Karen Silkwood thing -- if all the facts are in about that -- then that’s a case of deadly force and industrial hanky-panky. When you look at what we’ve been through from 1619 or at how different the United States is since 1960, you stand in front of young kids and discourage them? I can’t use that.

You can meet a young person who goes to school and is really enthusiastic, but if a sufficiently strong personality convinces them that this is a waste of time, that person might flunk out. On the other hand, I’m not saying that people should be mollycoddled. If youj’re going to get in the ring and try to take the belt, you have to prepare to get hit. But if you tell that the person that you’re fighting next week is gonna have a pistol and you have boxing gloves, then of course they’re gonna be demoralized. That streak is too much of the material I see today. When I was touring with All American Skin Game in some of these bookstores people would say that you have to tell these children that it doesn’t matter how much education they get or how good they are -- and this is someone who drove up there in a BMW -- thetas tantamount to a form of Negro insanity.

I know that early on you were affiliated with the Black Arts Movement. How did that influence your work?

My earliest writing was... that was just stuff in these big notebooks. later on, I became extremely influenced by LeRoi Jones and before him Norman Mailer. Advertisments for Myself was this extraordinarily big book to people of my generation.. The big thing was to GE a copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, anything by Henry James and Advertisements for Myself. I liked that stuff more than I liked James Baldwin because Baldwin didn’t seem visceral enough to me. When I ran into Leroi Jones, I was startled because he had this combination of streetwise stuff and high literary stuff. Plus that stuff had heat on it. Red hot. He was the one out of all those post-Beat poets. He didn’t yet have the kind of technique that Robert Duncan had, but... from a fire standpoint. One of the great American literary tragedies is that, in my opinion, he became a propagandist. If he’d followed is path, there’s no telling what he might have done. When they were reading his stuff, they must have said, “Man, this Negro here...

I worked under Jayne Cortez at the Watts Repertory Theatre Company and Studio Watts, she introduced me to Ralph Ellison. I read Invisible Man and it was explosive. It was way on the other side of everyone else. But at that point, I was under that thrall of Jones still. See, being tied up in somebody’s aesthetic is like being involved with a very beautiful woman and you see another one that you think is actually better for you and you go through this whole thing of disengaging yourself. Its not something you can do at the drop of a hat. I was beginning to see a bigger picture. What I was initially attracted to with Leroi Jones...

Through the perspective of all of literature. When you read the System of Dante’s Hell or the earlier stories in Tales, everything is in there, Joyce, Beckett, Melville, -- everything that was going on in his mind. When he became a black nationalist the stuff got narrower and narrower. When he became a Marxist, the depth and variety of invention began to wane. The things that made him initially interesting ceased to exist. Around that time, through Larry Neal, I had met Albert Murray. Through him I began to look at broader things, not denying race, but recognizing that culture was the issue, not race. And Afro-Americans are culturally part of the west. You go back to what the black teachers used to tell you anyway, which is that the great inventions bleong to everyone. That [relationship] with Murray has gone on for many years. There was just a broader, richer version of life that wasn’t like the good-guy/bad-guy element that was so fundamental to black nationalism.

Also around that time, I was teaching at the Claremont College and I was teaching things like Mob dick and Hemingway and Virginia Woolf as well as teaching a black studies class. I was trying to organize in my mind how all of these things could be coordinated. I was starting to see the direction I wanted to go in. But my style isn’t really like theirs. Good or bad, I just made my style up. I think I found my own way. Our styles are completely different -- but then again, if I was really imitating them, I wouldn’t mention them all the time.

I think that one of the most important things about the Ellison-Murray influence was coming back to ideas that I actually had grown up with. They had a lot of reservations about the things you had to have reservations about in terms of American double-standards, but they also had a lot of things that they liked. They like the amusement parks. The roller coasters -- ain’t nuthin’ African about a roller coaster. There are things that you enjoy and while you enjoy them you’re not thinking about trying not to be white. They made me remember that. One of their arguments is that far too many African Americans get caught up in the ideas of sociological outsiders, so they define themselves as pathological rather than saying “O.K., we have a problem, but there is a lot of things that we like.”

But Ellison is criticized for underestimating the damage done to black communities by racism and the legacy of slavery.

First thing is this. No one reading Invisible Man could say that he didn’t understand the multiple levels on which people had been messed over by racism. Like Trueblood, the black student body tried to keep him hidden because he was country and would embarrass them in front of white folks. And that is a feeling that has never left. Whenever I would see Biggie Smalls I still would be embarrassed for about ten seconds. I’d think, “This guy is absolutely inarticulate.” Or you see something going down the street and these guys come by in a jeep blasting MOTHERFUCKER-MOTHERFUCKER-MOTHERFUCKER-MOTHERFUCKER. On that hand, that’s what Ellison was talking about. Also those shell-shocked vets were a metaphor for black people who had been shell-shocked by experience.

You’ve made some strong criticisms of rap, but it seems to me that you could make a strong case for the things you hate about rap being thematic extensions of the blues.

Yeah, its the antecedent. But or problem is this: if we take different types of folk doggerel and its not categorized appropriately... my problem is that this is made available to children. Not because of the words, you know all the curse words when you’re a little kid -- you don’t say them, but you know them. But there are a number of attitudes that should not be emotionally or psychologically ingested by young people. That’s why I say that if that was put in the adult record arena, it would be okay. Young people have big enough problem facing the way that this society is shifting in terms of technology and the higher rate of divorce and so on.

They don’t need to be encouraged to be irresponsibly promiscuous, or unnecessarily violent or obsessed with materialism, the contemptuous attitudes toward women, or any type of romantic commitment, the hedonism -- that’s far and away from what people used to listen to. People say that you should listen to these records so you’ll know what’s going on out there, but people have always done the same dumb shit. What am I going to learn that I didn’t know already 35 years ago? I’ve seen Negroes get shot. I’ve been arrested -- sometimes they should have arrested me -- like this fraudulent conception that overtime the police “harass” these young guys out there, that they’re innocent. Sometimes you are, but I remember many times when I was on the way from something I had done that was wrong or on my way to do something wrong, I got stopped. I’m by no means advocating that the police go out there beating people up, but I know about teenage life and sometimes you are out to do something dumb. This idea that sheer vulgarity, this decadent vision of life is supposed to be black authenticity denies the existence of all these other black kids who do nothing of that sort. They’re not selling crack, not gang banging, they’re not thieves.

My daughter has a scar on her hand from where these guys shot up a party because they couldn’t get in. Now she told me that the girl she was with at that party was killed recently killed because she was with the wrong person. That violent anarchic extreme is presented as [all of] black youth. The argument is made that if you don’t like the world that Tupac Shakur represented, you don’t like black youth. I contend that black youth are the ones on the floor with the bullets flying over their heads.