Music |Writing |Race

White Blues, Black Blues — Your Blues, My Blues

What Are the Blues, and Who Are They For?

Unless you’re a regular reader of the Altamont Enterprise in upstate New York, you’ve probably never heard of the poet and writer Dennis Sullivan.

Truth is, I wouldn’t know about him either if it weren’t for a friend, a former high school headmaster who was taught by Mr. Sullivan back in the day.

Every now and then, the headmaster sends me something literary he thinks I might enjoy. He’s known me long enough by now to be right most of the time.

This is especially true of Sullivan whose work I enjoy because it usually leads to an epiphany. It helps me understand something I did not understand before. Or at least shows me another way of looking at it.

Do White People Understand the Blues?

A few days ago, the headmaster sent me a Sullivan piece called, “White people don’t understand about the blues,” which begins by asking the reader which is greater — Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box or Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.

While I was still trying to justify my answer to that little teaser, Mr. Sullivan hit me with a similar riddle. Which song is better — Schubert’s “Ave Maria” or Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man?”

Along this path I went like Dante guided by Virgil until I reached the epiphany — a phrase from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom by August Wilson, which illuminates the latest chapter in America’s ongoing reckoning with race. That phrase boils down to the difference between the way white folks and black folks listen to the blues.

“White folks don’t understand about the blues,” it says. “They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there. They don’t understand that’s life’s way of talking. You don’t sing to feel better. You sing ’cause that’s a way of understanding life.”

Those words took me all the way back to Bernard Malamud’s novel The Tenants about a white writer and a Black writer who live and work on their novels in separate sections of an abandoned New York apartment building, unaware of the other’s presence. When they finally meet and become friends (sort of), they decide to play an album by Billie Holiday. The Black guy gets upset about halfway through the music. “You don’t listen to it right,” he says. And there’s no way to explain to the white guy what he’s talking about.

It’s impossible to miss the point. The implication in the Ma Rainey story covers a 70-year time span that links a moment in 1951 with the cri de couer that can be heard all across the country in 2020.

I soon found myself in a cascade of realizations. One thought led to another. I remembered that Chadwick Boseman was battling colorectal cancer while working on a film version of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. It was scheduled for release on Netflix this year but had to be postponed because of his untimely death.

As news of his illness spread following his demise, I learned that Black men are more susceptible to this disease and more likely to die from it than whites. Even in death, the actor seemed to be raising awareness.

Dennis Sullivan doesn’t mention Chadwick Boseman in his essay. But as I read his thoughts about August Wilson’s Ma Rainey, it was inevitable that I should wind up feeling renewed gratitude for the actor’s contributions.

If you’re not familiar with the play, you’ll get some idea of its power from this dramatic reading by Ebony Jo-Ann, created for August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand, in the PBS American Masters series, February 20, 2015. In the clip, she explains why she thinks white folks don’t really understand the blues.

Chadwick Boseman‘s Artistic Choices During His Illness

During his private struggle with a life-threatening illness, Chadwick Boseman chose to shine a light not on himself but on the great figures whose lives he portrayed in film.

Thurgood Marshall, Jackie Robinson, T’Challa/Black Panther, James Brown, the struggle of Black soldiers during the Vietnam War, and a play by the greatest African American playwright of the 20th century.

These are the people and issues the actor wanted us to think about. This is where he put his energy during the last days of his 43-year sojourn on earth. I wondered what the rest of us would do if we knew the chances of living for another day were less than 50–50.

How would we talk to one another? What choices would we make? How would we communicate our love?

Boseman often praised and thanked Denzel Washington, who paid for his college acting classes when he was still a struggling wannabe.

He frequently credited Washington for being a role model. But in the characters he chose to play, Boseman was also indebted to another great actor — Sidney Poitier.

During the turbulent 1960s, when Hollywood sometimes wanted him to portray racial stereotypes, Poitier put his career on the line by standing up to them. “I will not play that,” he said. And he didn’t.

Instead of shucking and jiving across the silver screen, he gave us To Sir, with Love, A Patch of Blue, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Defiant Ones, Lilies of the Field, Separate but Equal, and many others-picking up an Oscar, a knighthood, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom along the way.

Making White People Comfortable

That was a time when America’s silent and often indifferent majority needed to see African Americans apart from the minstrelsy versions of Black life they had been brought up to regard as real.

They needed to understand who was marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Enduring attack dogs, fire hoses, billy clubs. And why. White people needed to take their blinders off. They needed to discover the humanity of a people who had always been invisible to them. Poitier’s films helped them do it. This was certainly true when he appeared with Spencer Tracy in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 1967.

He would eventually take a lot of “heat” for this. One particularly scathing piece was called, “Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier So?”

The problem was this: White people could turn to his saintly characters to criticize the rest of us. “Why can’t all you black people be more like him?”

The subtext to that goes something like this: Why can’t you behave in a way that makes white people feel more comfortable?

Why can’t you all have a PhD, solve murders in a racist Southern town while your life is being threatened, and present yourselves in ways that mirror white life instead of the reality you have been forced to live due to Jim Crow, financial disempowerment, and the lingering effects of slavery?

Why can’t you just get over it? Is that too much to ask?

All these things came to mind while reading Dennis Sullivan’s “White folks don’t understand about the blues.” He doesn’t say all of this himself. His essay is Promethean. It provides the fire that lights the reader’s own fire.

That’s why I wanted to tell you about him. That’s why I’m including a link to his story here. I don’t expect your thoughts to be the same as mine. But I’ll bet you’ll have a few of your own. Which is a beautiful and necessary thing, don’t you think?

I believe America is filled with other souls like Sullivan. People who do not clamor for ratings or the limelight but speak their truth quietly in a way that resonates for others.

We are accosted by angry didactic writing everywhere we turn these days. Agenda-driven windbags hurl their polemics into the noosphere like poison darts.

You see them on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Without asking, you get to see their slick commercials, the half-truths, misleading statements, and outright lies.

In a world like this, it’s reassuring to find writing that allows you to go into yourself. That gets you to reflect on life — instead of arguing about it.

Here’s another link to his story. I hope it lights your fire too.

Originally published at https://www.jazprose.com on September 18, 2020.