And Navigate His Own

I understood the premise George Schuyler’s “Black No More” and it seemed a fitting follow-up to Wallace Thurman’s “The Blacker the Berry, a Novel of Negro Life.”  Inventions!  What’ll they think of next?  A time machine?  Space travel?  A nerve treatment that turns blacks into whites?  It sounded like an afro-futurist, absurdist gag that might have been a much more modern creation.  Schuyler skewers the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance and forces the matter into an essential reduction:  if you could, would you?  If you did, would it be to your liking?

I read the thoughtful and rather contemporary introduction by Danzy Senna, whom I learned, is a compelling personage in her own right.  I’ll have to return there.  She brought to my attention that Schulyer had a rather underwent a remarkable progression as a thinker, shifting from his socialist leanings to becoming an anti-communist, member of the John Birch society as the thirties became the fifties.  I read over his bio quickly in Wiki just now.  I note my own prejudice I suppose, in taking conservative African Americans seriously. Schuyler wrote vile things about Martin Luther King Jnr., He ran for Congress on the conservative party ticket supporting Barry Goldwater.  In 1960 he had this to say about apartheid:  "In South Africa you have a system of apartheid. That's their business. I don’t think it’s the business of other people to change their society.”  One can’t but wonder, did he really believe this?  And indeed, even though it's vile, why shouldn’t he be allowed to believe whatever he wants and navigate his own, genuine intellectual progression?

It brought to mind another writer, pundit whom my friend had recently sent me a clip of.  This old friend now finds increasing delight in memes from the what I would call the far right. I must say I don’t like “clips” of video as a way to share ideas and when I receive instructions to forward to the minute-nine where it gets really inflammatory . . . an intellectual turn off.  Easy, too easy, to cogitate, for a moment.  Next clip.  So, I usually pass on the clips, but I took to one that was interesting, that involved another such black, conservative intellectual, Thomas Sowell.  I could find inflammatory comments by him as well, but he was also seemed a thoughtful economist whom I should at least afford the curtesy of listening to, before I dismissed outright.  Here too, many of the conclusions he draws are difficult to digest, but at least one appreciates the rationale attempt to build his thesis. 

I read the first twenty pages or so of “Black No More” in the facilities, this morning and I am already hooked.  He’s got me from the outset.  Max Disher is smitten by a white lady.  He gets the perfect chance at the club to ask her to dance and she dismisses him in a manner almost too cruel to comprehend.  I put the book down and winced when I read the line.  And now he’s reconnected with his old friend the doctor, and he’s talked his way to the head of the line, and he’s had the treatment.  Max is now a blond, Nordic looking guy.  And the door man at the club back up in Harlem tells him, the white man, to go away.  His voice is all he has to convince his old friends that it is indeed he at the door.  “Let me in.  It’s me.”  We shall see.

Sunday 07/19/20