White Guilt (15 page)

Historical corrections always come cruelly. They shame as a means to power and transformation. This is how the baby-boomer dissociational left defeated its parents' generation. And this is how history is once again moving. Bush is only the current face of an ascending historical judgment.

 

When I departed from the left in the late eighties, it wasn't because I was prescient enough to see the historical correction that was already building. I simply couldn't take the schizophrenia required to stay in the cultural and political world that I had always belonged to. But as my father-in-law used to say, “You go to the dentist with a toothache and he pours hot tar on your head.” I was caught in the defining contradiction of the culture war: on one side no enforcement of principle; on the other side the stigmatization that prevents enforcement. I escaped schizophrenia but I walked right into stigmatization as an Uncle Tom. I was happier living more consistently with myself, but it was suddenly extremely difficult to connect with other blacks and liberal whites. My only trick as a writer has been to write about America without the schizophrenia imposed on blacks by the culture war. I don't have to “protect” blacks or any other group by pretending that certain self-serving lies (“systemic” racism remains a barrier) are true. That kind of thing almost smothered my life as a free man. And if I've learned anything in all of this, it is that if you want to be free, you have to make yourself that way and pay whatever price the world exacts. So I am quite free now. And it is the rare black who gets to live without the world expecting him to pretend. So I don't mind so much that little bit of hot tar the world has poured on my head.

 

There is a point at which westbound Highway 68 merges with Highway 1, the old Pacific Coast Highway. When this happens you are already in town. Just before you, as if you were seeing it in a movie, the tree-muted lights of Monterey spill down a long slope of coastal mountain to meet the Monterey Bay. If this has always been a sweet sight for me, it was even sweeter on that night. Only a few hours later I started my little Chautauqua all over again, only this time on paper.

Shelby Steele
Literary Beginnings

W
HEN
I
WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD
I was transferred out of an all-black segregated
school and into an all-white school nearby. For this simple transfer to occur in the segregated Chicago of the late fifties, my parents had to launch a mini civil rights movement of their own. There were many confrontations with local authorities, and a boycott that closed the all-black school for a full year. At the center of this maelstrom my parents were often distracted, sometimes terrorized, and always eaten up with outrage. They saw themselves misquoted in the newspapers, and everywhere heard lies about themselves. On certain occasions the phone would ring, a chill would infuse the house, and I would be sent away “just to play it safe.”

Yet, somehow, all of this led to a very positive change in my life. After a year of living with frayed nerves I had begun to feel an unassuageable fatigue and irritability, as if I had gone from childhood immediately into old age. But toward the end of that year one of the most important events in my life took place: my new teacher at the white school I had transferred into gave me a book to read,
Kit Carson and the Pony Express.

Of course, after six years of segregated education, I was virtually illiterate. Yet I accepted this thin volume—written at a sixth-grade level—as if I was going to rush home and finish it off in a single sitting. In fact, it took me almost nine months of steady effort to read this small book from beginning to end. No one helped me as I labored to unravel its hieroglyphics. But gradually I came to see and feel the relationship between these marks on paper—language—and life itself. When I finally finished the book, the written word and the heroic adventures of Kit Carson were one, and from then on I could no longer stand the thought of being without a book. On the day I finished Kit Carson I went to the local drug store and purchased
The Mud Hen and the Walrus.
From there I went through the entire Chip Hilton sports series. By the ninth grade I was reading Charles Dickens and Somerset Maugham and Richard Wright. I was mesmerized by the frankness and rhetorical drama of James Baldwin's essays, though I often missed his allusions.

Reading blessed me with a life that was parallel to the life I was actually living. And all the way through college and graduate school it was this parallel world of reading that most engaged me emotionally and intellectually. School, for me, was never more than counterpoint to the autodidacticism of my actual intellectual engagement.

So, out of childhood despair and without any conscious intention, I developed a parallel self—a rather fearless self that wanted to make its own sense of things. Reading is an encounter with someone else's private and parallel self, and it is impossible to read a lot without wanting to nurture such a self within one's own life. Inevitably, as the years of reading mount, this wildly independent and parallel self wants more and more to express itself in language—that is, to write.

Even as I read constantly, I admitted to no one—least of all myself—that I wanted to“be a writer.”Yet in high school I often wrote two weekly essays when only one was required. I sent long and labored letters to the editor of the local newspaper. I wrote love letters for friends to the girls they pined for—any excuse to plunk words down on paper.

So finally it was this parallel life, the fruit of reading, that made writing a necessity for me. My guess is that many writers are born of some crucible, some sharp pinch that sets off the reading and, thus, the parallel life. Maybe we need a second self to buffer us from the first. In any case, this second self becomes more and more urgent over time, less and less repressible. And one writes simply to bring it into reality.

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