Benj DeMott replies to Bongani Madondo’s correspondence posted at “Mad Love (& Hate) Pt.1.“
January 9th, 2016
Bigger B –
Sounds like the New Year is gonna be tough on all our asses. But I’m grateful for your news. I’ll make your musicking moves soon. In the meantime…
Bet you’re right about Miriam M.—my older sis had a Makeba LP in her little collection of folk records—along with Shirelles’ record avec “Soldier Boy” and a Buddy Holly album…Crossover rules even in ‘62!
Thanks for steer to Ms. Biss’s essay, which I’d missed. Cool to see her disturbing the peace of Times readers. For what it’s worth, I think the key is to find a way to talk straight without giving into straight-up anti-Americanism. My own experience hints pro-American turns are as verboten in certain NYC circles as race talk. (Ms. Biss quotes Ta-Nehisi Coates a lot but I wonder if she’s aware how much Coates is locked on the American Civil War. My country looks more…exceptional when you realize it fought a war to abolish slavery that cost more than half a million lives. No illusions, btw, that war “to preserve the Union” was against racism (but there’s still no other country with such a freedom struggle in their back pages and I hope Ms. Biss’s son doesn’t skip its legacy when he reflects on America).
White New York progressives are always tempted to disdain the, ah, heartland. They tend to roll with Euros and/or cosmopolitans, distancing themselves from the hot mess of America’s multi-culture. I’m afraid you get a whiff of what blows in from the East Coast in Ms. Biss’s essay. (Though I also feel her since I share her sense a readiness to grasp how race shapes dailiness often puts you at odds with white folks—wherever they’re from or whatever their politics.) Remember when she brings up her kid’s alienated take—“I wish I was French.”—on that scene in the LITTLE HOUSE book. She suggests that line means he’s down with the Indians. I seriously doubt that. What’s certain, though, is the heroine of those (great) kids’ books identifies totally with the Osage in a memorable scene that occurs right after Ms. Biss stopped reading. Since you dig a good story…
The little girl, Laura, watches a great parade of Osage leaving the territory after an “Indian Jamboree.” She has “a naughty wish to be a little Indian girl.” (Laura’s Mom is a racist re Indians; her dad, though, is “perfectly friendly”—to borrow his characterization of an Osage warrior. More on Pa anon.) Laura’s wish gets stronger as she “looked and looked at the Indians and they looked at her” until an Indian mother rides past her “with a basket on each side of her pony…”
Laura looked straight into the bright eyes of the little baby nearer her. Only its small head showed above the basket’s rim. Its hair was as black as a crow and its eyes were black as a night when no stars shine.
Those black eyes looked deep into Laura’s eyes and she looked deep down into the blackness of that little baby’s eyes, and she wanted that one little baby.
“Pa” she said, “get me that little Indian baby!”
“Hush Laura!” Pa told her sternly.
The little baby was going by. Its head turned and its eyes kept looking into Laura’s eyes.
“Oh, I want it! I want it!” Laura begged…”…It wants to stay with me…”
“Hush Laura.” Pa said. “That Indian mother wants to keep her baby…”
“Oh Pa!” Laura pleaded, and then she began to cry. It was shameful to cry, but she couldn’t help it. The little Indian baby was gone. She knew she would never see it any more.
Ma said she had never heard of such a thing.
“For shame, Laura,” she said, but Laura could not stop crying. “Why on earth do you want an lndian baby, of all things!” Ma asked her.
“Its eyes are so black,” Laura sobbed. She could not say what she meant.
She can’t say, but there’s a human stain in American history that shows what she meant (again and again). It’s that Baldwin love thing. (Please don’t understand me too quickly though; I’m not one of those fools who assume Americans will screw their way to a color-blind future.) And of course, mixing it up is old news to you since you can’t get enough of Johnny Cash.
But too many ideologically correct types from El Norte miss the beauty of America’s crossover flows. Been blind/deaf myself on this front sometimes even though my life has been made by Laura-like longings. (I’m reminded just now Laura was the name of Malcolm X’s first love in Beantown—that Church girl cum sexy dancer whose figure shaped my own avid nights). My lil’ history of blankness about certain of America’s musical mutts came home to me last month when I heard Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie.” Back in 69, I thought the song was kitsch. Turns out White just sounded too down home for my New England ears. (Since you go for Johnny C., here’s a clip of him and White doing “Annie” together.) Any country that can make a white man with as much as soul as Tony Joe ain’t all bad. (Not my place to say, but is it possible that someone like Johnny Clegg redeems your beloved country’s mad white folks?!) I worry the implicit anti-Americanism of Ms. Biss will make it harder for her son to pick up on some of the best stuff that’s been cooked up in the house he lives in. Let me come back to the LITTLE HOUSE books.
The daddy is a damn paragon—an undeniable No-in-wonder to D.H. Lawrence’s riff on “The essential American soul”: “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” In a set-piece in one of the books, he heads out in the evening to kill a deer so the family will have meat after months without. But they end up staying hungry, and Pa later explains to his daughters why. He’d faded out in his hiding place in the trees above the dear-lick but woke up in time:
The big round moon was just rising. I could see it between the bare branches of the trees, low in the sky. And right against it I saw a deer standing. His head was up and he was listening. His great branching horns stood out above his head. He was dark against the moon.
It was a perfect shot. But he was so beautiful. He looked so strong and free and wild, that I couldn’t kill him. I sat there and looked at him until he bounded away into the dark woods.
Pa knows his wife and kids are waiting on good fresh game. But as the night goes by, he ends up passing up chances to shoot a bear and then a doe with a yearling.
No meat for his fam that season, but Pa gives them music instead. He’s a fiddler and the LITTLE HOUSE books are full of fine scenes of American musicking like the ender to Big Woods where Laura lies “awake a little while, listening to Pa’s fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the woods.” She gazes at her Pa and Mom sitting near the hearth:
She thought to herself, “This is now.”
She was glad that the cozy home, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light and the music were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
Now’s the time to beat despair (always). And music’s our way out of the slough, right? Know you’re ambivalent about Madiba but he wasn’t wrong about that. Per his dance-and-rap here with Johnny Clegg.
Did you know your favorite Firster, Charlie O’Brien, hipped me to the original version of “Asimbonanga”? [Editor’s note: The song sung by Clegg in the performance invoked above.] It was on the Sounds of Soweto double-album along with Thetha’s “Dark Street, Dark Night”—that bit of “serious fluff” O’Brien extolled for being truer to the moment of its moment than Paul Simon’s bland Graceland:
The lyrics are something like those of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The guy doesn’t want to leave, except that it’s hot outside: you could get yourself killed out there. The refrain is:
Dark street, bad night…
You can hear them,
You can see them hiding in the shadows,
Dark street, bad night
It just don’t feel right
Look out baby, time is running outThe more prudent course would be to slip away when the opportunity presented itself. But no. As the street gets darker and darker and the night worse, the bassman takes one solo after another, the song goes on and on. Baby, that is rock and roll.
O’Brien may have been all about that bass cause his people were born fighting. (Per the old joke re the “Hibernian” at the bar brawl: “Is this a private fight or can anyone join in?”). But let’s give original Americans a shout-out too. O’Brien grew up in the same building as Le War Lance—human anchor of Ian Frazier’s study of Native American culture, On the Rez, which holds Indians are among the few Americans who have preserved an ideal of heroism: “Most everyone wants to be rich, millions want to be famous, but no one today wants to be mistaken for a hero.” This attitude, per Frazier, is “profoundly unindian.” It’s definitely un-O’Brien (whom Le War Lance dubbed “freaky white boy”).
You take care in your home of the brave.
Abrazos, B. PS: I’m no jingo so I should admit “Polk Salad Annie” broke in Paris before it became a hit in America. PPS No time yet to get deep into Nakhane Toure’s music but I can tell he’s ballsy and sweet. I dug this one right away. Hope his black gay voice resonates in the Motherland.
[Part 3 of “Mad Love (& Hate)” here.]