by Leonard Gill
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man
By Henry Louis Gates Jr., Random House, 218
pp., $22
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is chair
of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, but Gates the chair
is anything but stationary. We're not even into spring, and this year alone
has already seen the publication of his co-edited Dictionary of Global
Culture, the paperback edition of The Future of the Race (with
colleague Cornel West), and now a collection of profiles lifted from The
New Yorker and The New Republic, titled Thirteen Ways of Looking
at a Black Man.
The lives of James Bald-win, Albert Murray, Anatole Broyard, Bill T. Jones, Colin Powell, Louis Farrakhan, Harry Belafonte, and O.J. Simpson offer Gates, if not exactly 13, then several "ways of looking," but what of the "black man" of the title? The author clarifies that point right off the bat in his introduction:
"We can agree that the notion of a unitary black man is imaginary ; and yet to be a black man in 20th-century America is to be heir to a set of anxieties: beginning with what it means to be a black man. All of the protagonists of this book confront the `burden of representation,' the homely notion that you represent your race, thus that your actions can betray your race or honor it. ... By no stretch of the imagination do the men portrayed in this book present a cross section of black males. But all are people who have borne some freight of being iconic: people who have been vested with meaning, allegorized; and who have defined themselves by struggling against other meanings, other allegories.
"[A] portfolio of black American men -- yes, Representative Negroes, which is to say, most unrepresentative ones indeed."
The voice of black America in the early 1960s is how Gates describes the outsider-intellectual James Baldwin. By the mid-'60s, though, more militant voices were forcing the "connoisseur of complexity" into the robes of an ideologue, and it was never a comfortable fit. Baldwin -- and his reputation -- went into exile in France.
In 1970, the equally militant integrationist Albert Murray came out with The Omni-Americans, "a book in which the very language of the black nationalists was subjected to a strip search." Murray's firm belief that American culture was essentially black culture may have kept him from exile, but his faith in art ran against the prevailing political winds. (Or was it that Murray's thinking was the most radical of all?) Among Gates' subjects, he may still be the least known to a wider reading audience.
Anatole Broyard -- "the Scheherazade of racial imposture" -- is certainly known to readers of The New York Times Book Review, but in seeking to be a writer rather than a black writer, his solution was to deny his race altogether. The strategy of ambiguity and equivocation made him into a fascinating and deeply troubled personality, but not into the novelist his friends hoped for.
Harry Belafonte never denied his heritage, but the timing was all wrong. In the late '50s, he was too dark to host white performers on his variety show; in the '60s, the "Tab Hunter-with-a-tan look" wasn't "black black" enough for the black-power brokers. Acting parts went to his friend Sidney Poitier, and however much Belafonte allied himself with Martin Luther King and the larger issue of world justice, his concert audience remained and remains overwhelmingly white.
So too the audience for choreographer Bill T. Jones' dance works. An avowed "artist first and a black man second," Jones came of age a generation later than his fellow subjects in this book and took a comfortable position among the European avant-garde. One has to wonder, however, whether the play of racial and sexual ironies in his work and his program of "transgressing boundaries" isn't itself a fancified, post-modernist version of the "burden of representation."
Gates is excellent at conveying the tensions that pull at each of his subjects, but he does so almost despite a thoroughly relaxed mode of reporting. He claims to being no good at interviewing, though what he elicits often amounts to an interviewer's dream come true (abetted by a fascination with particulars): Colin Powell breaking into James Brown's Camel Walk to prove he's a "regular brother"; Louis Farrakhan, in his "Sunday parlour respectability," talking of revelation during a Lionel Ritchie concert. Gates calls Farrakhan "deeply strange," but a man he can't help but like on a purely personal basis. He compares Farrakhan to a radio station. What you hear depends on what you've tuned into: an exhilirating vision for black America or some crackpot obsession.
Gates' close reading of the reactions to the criminal trial of O.J. Simpson, however, represents the author at his analytical best. I doubt whether you will come across a better summary of the ways in which the black community itself was divided on Simpson's innocence or guilt and "in ways invisible to most whites." Gates takes "the empty vessel" that is O.J. Simpson and finds it filled with "more meaning than any of us can bear." Thirteen doesn't begin to count the ways of looking at this one black man.