Democracy Matters (11 page)

The murders of Medgar, Malcolm, and Martin were devastating to Baldwin. Vietnam was another wound; the U.S.-supported fascist coup in Chile another bruise; the invisibility of Palestinian suffering in U.S. foreign policy another scar. Even democratic intellectuals can bear only so much. The time was so out of joint—cursed with spite—that he began to wonder whether it could ever be set right. Yet he labored on—comforted more and more by the blues and jazz he cherished and the family he cared so much for. He had
made a free artist of himself, had dug as deep as the soul could go, and was as sincere as the Holy Ghost. Yet, he wondered, does America have what it takes to conquer racism and dismantle empire? If so, when will it muster the vision and courage to do so? If not, what are we to do? At his funeral in New York City in 1987, Baldwin himself was heard singing Thomas Dorsey’s classic—and Martin Luther King’s favorite—song: “Precious Lord, take my hand. Lead me on, let me stand. I am tired, I am weak, I am worn….”

This book is, in part, an extension of the Emersonian tradition in our time. Its vision and analysis is enriched by the powerful Emersonian voices of the past. But there is another stream in the deep democratic tradition from which it also draws, and even more deeply. While the Emersonian tradition emphasizes the vital role of a citizen’s individual commitment to democracy and highlights the vast potentials of American democracy, even while nailing its failures to the wall, the special focus of this other tradition is the excoriating critique of America’s imperialist and racist impediments to democratic individuality, community, and society. It explicitly makes race and empire the two major limits of the American democratic experiment.

This stream begins in the works of Herman Melville, unappreciated in their time, and still less appreciated than they should be, as damning commentaries on the evils of empire. While the Emersonian is preoccupied with redeeming the soul of America—through its swings from its low to its high moments—the Melvillean tradition seriously questions whether America has a soul, has lost its soul, or ever really had a soul. It begins where Baldwin’s disenchantment ends and may leave us with at least one foot (if not both
feet) in despair. This stream includes the indispensable Robert Penn Warren, the tragically poetic Eugene O’Neill, the indomitable genius of blues and jazz artists, and the profound fiery witness of Toni Morrison.

Melville’s corpus—from
Typee
(1846) to
Billy Budd
(1891)—is an unprecedented and unmatched meditation on the imperialist and racist impediments to democracy in American life. Robert Penn Warren follows Melville’s lead and lays bare the depths of white supremacy and imperial realities in the making of America. Such Warren classics as
Brother to Dragons
(1953, 1979—both versions are a scathing critique of Thomas Jefferson’s pervasive racism and one-eyed rationalism) and
Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé
(1983; his poem about “the bloody history of the conquest of the West…One of the most murderous stories we can think of”) are often overlooked and ignored in American letters. Eugene O’Neill’s obsession with the nihilism of American imperial and racist rule runs from his first play,
Thirst
(1913), in which he played a mulatto sailor, to his greatest play,
The Iceman Cometh
(1939), which indicts American civilization and the human condition.

Melville is the deep-sea diver of the American democratic tradition; indeed in
Pierre
(1852), he quips:

Melville’s terrifying descent into the unfathomable depths is a plunge not only into existential nothingness but also into the heart of American darkness.

Melville expressed a radical suspicion of the capacity of the American empire to cast aside its childish innocence and confront its nihilistic violence. He grappled with the hard mystery of America’s imperial impulse to dominate and conquer others and exposed the martial ideas and monarchical principles hiding behind peaceful language and benign democratic rhetoric. For Melville, beneath the smooth surfaces of American democracy festered the ravages of Amerindian genocide and the damages of African slavery. The self-remaking American individualist—the American gentleman—was also a slaveholder and an Indian annihilator. Again from
Pierre:

Melville’s Ahab in
Moby-Dick
(1851) is a nihilist obsessed with power and might, hell-bent on conquering the axis of evil in his Manichaean (us versus them, good versus evil) vision. Ahab’s blind will to conquer the white whale torpedoes his precious ship and crew. His own destruction results from an emptiness and loneliness driven by the dogmatism and nihilism that are metaphorical of an imperial America unable to confront painful truths about itself. As a captain of industry on a floating factory of multiracial workers producing whale oil, Ahab is obsessed with subduing an elusive white whale that simultaneously sustains and maims him. His last words—reminiscent of those of Shakespeare’s King Lear and his namesake in 1 Kings 22 in the Old Testament—are: “Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.”

Yet Melville’s despair about America—or life itself—is not absolute in
Moby-Dick.
His American poetic epic—more than a novel yet not a classical epic poem—begins with the famous line “Call me Ishmael,” harkening to the biblical Ishmael, the son of a slave mother. Ishmael is the slim beacon of hope, the only one who survives the journey. And he survives in a coffin-raft given to him by his only friend, Queequeg, a man of color—in stark contrast to the white-dominated ship—whose near death prompted the building of the coffin. Ishmael’s survival at the end of the book is therefore due to Queequeg’s agency. The carving on the lid of the coffin symbolizes “a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth.” Even as
Moby-Dick
is an indictment of American imperialism, it is also a call for multiracial solidarity.

In fact, Ishmael’s journey begins with an encounter with the black underside of America, and his engagement with the vision of America’s dark side will push him from innocence to maturity. He begins his story in a state of despair; a despair he longs to overcome by getting “to sea as soon as I can.” Waiting for the ship to embark, he goes from inn to inn searching for a place to stay in New Bedford. In searching for the cheapest inn, he finds himself in the black section of town—among those caught in the hellish death grip of imperial and racist America. Melville writes:

This black inferno in which the struggle with nihilism is surmounted will mirror his subsequent journey in which the imperial Ahab’s wrestling with nihilism leads to devastation. Ellison’s invisible man one hundred years later repeats this scene with the preacher speaking on “the blackness of blackness”—another initiation into imperial America through the lens of race. Both Ishmael and the invisible man are exemplary seekers of democratic individuality, community, and society through the black brook of fire in America.

For Melville, this black inferno was not only the vantage point of viewing the American democratic experiment but also the litmus test for assessing the deep democratic tradition in America. The enslavement of Africans and Manifest Destiny over Amerindians proved the noble lie of American democracy. And he felt this on the most intimate of levels. His father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, was the chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts who handed down the most famous test of the Fugitive Slave Law. Shaw ordered the black ex-slave Thomas Sims back to his southern owner. Later, in another infamous case, Shaw decreed that the fugitive ex-slave Anthony Burns return to his owner. Melville’s abolitionist sentiments cut against the grain of many in his personal family and national community, but he expressed them nonetheless. Today his loving yet harsh indictment of America rings louder and truer than ever. And he has always resonated with the most acute truth tellers of America. The commitment to self-worth and individual potential of the Emersonian combines with the commitment to deep-searching truth telling of the Melvillean in the most American of art forms, the blues and jazz.

Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington and Ma Rainey, John Coltrane and Sarah Vaughan—all foundational figures of the blues and jazz heritage—created and enacted a profound democratic
paideia
—a cultivation of critical citizenry—in the midst of the darkness of America. If the blues is the struggle against pain for transcendence, then, as Duke Ellington proclaimed, “jazz is freedom.” Like Emerson, these great blues and jazz musicians are eloquent connoisseurs of individuality in their improvisational arts and experimental lives. Unlike Emerson, they sit on the edge
of America’s abyss—in the invisible chocolate infernos of the American paradise. Like Melville, they engage in deep-sea diving beneath the apparent American sunshine. Unlike Melville, they emerge with a strong blood-soaked hope and a seductive tear stained smile. They are the consummate American practitioners of the tragicomic.

This world-historical black confrontation with the absurd in America and the absurd as America—with the frightening American threat to black sanity and dignity in slavery, Jim Crow, and discrimination—produced a distinctive deepening of the democratic tradition in America. This deepening is not simply a matter of the expansion of rights and liberties for all Americans as seen in the social movements led by Frederick Douglass, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ella Baker. It also has to do with the very meaning of democracy in America—the recasting of the contours of democratic vision and the re-creating of the contents of democratic modes of existence. The blues and jazz made it possible to engage race in America on personal and intimate terms—with democratic results. The great white literary bluesman Tennessee Williams prophetically entitled his first collection of plays
American Blues.
The rich blues and jazz heritage was eventually embraced by white citizens and was especially appealing to the antiestablishment youth behind the infectious pulses of rock. This heritage was the first major cultural point of contact between whites and blacks, and we’ve seen this dynamic again in the embrace of rhythm and blues and hip-hop by white citizens.

As infectious and embracing as the blues is, we should never forget that the blues was born out of the crucible of slavery and its
vicious legacy, that it expresses the determination of a people to assert their human value. The blues professes to the deep psychic and material pains inflicted on black people within the sphere of a mythological American land of opportunity. The central role of the human voice in this heritage reflects the commitment to the value of the individual and of speaking up about ugly truths; it asserts the necessity of robust dialogue—of people needing to listen up—in the face of entrenched dogma. The patient resilience expressed in the blues flows from the sustained resistance to ugly forms of racist domination, and from the forging of inextinguishable hope in the contexts of American social death and soul murder. The blues produced a mature spiritual and communal strength. The stress the blues placed on dialogue, resistance, and hope is the very lifeblood for a vital democratic citizenry.

The most sophisticated exploration of this black enactment of dialogue, resistance, and hope is found in the magisterial corpus of Toni Morrison. The blues and jazz heritage speaks most profoundly and profusely in her literary works. She is the towering democratic artist and intellectual of our time. Morrison’s texts embody and enact forms of deep democratic energies unparalleled in America’s long struggle with the dark side of its democracy.

She highlights the strong will and potential promise of democratic individuals. Ordinary people taking back their power sit at the center of her artistic vision. Regarding one of her masterpieces,
Beloved
(1987), she states:

This profoundly democratic action, of taking back power over one’s life—enacted both by Morrison as artist and her characters in her art—is indebted to Emersonian nonconformity and resistance to prevailing authority. But like Melville, Morrison is also keenly alert to the formidable impediments to democratic individuality and community. One of her most vivid characters, Sethe in
Beloved
, explains why she killed her daughter, named Beloved, when a fugitive-slave hunter came to take them all back to their southern slave owners. Sethe says: