Cornel West - Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir

PART I: A SHILOH BAPTIST KIND OF BROTHER

PART II: A PHILOSOPHER WITH A GROOVE

PART III: RACE MATTERS

PART IV: THE MATRIX

PLANES DUE TO TAKE OFF in a few minutes. Awfully tight here in the coach compartment of the big 747, but, as the O'Jays put it, "money can do funny things to some people," and my money's been funny for years, so coach will have to do. Coach is cool. It's a blessing to be on this plane at all. Blessing to be alive. Blessing to be on this journey of love.

I take my phone from my vest pocket and call my blessed mother in Sacramento.

"Off to see Zeytun," I tell Mama. Zeytun is my eight-year-old daughter who lives in Bonn, Germany.

"You give that beautiful child a kiss for me, son."

"You know I'm going to do that. Stay strong, Mama."

I look around the cabin and see that just about everyone is equipped with a laptop computer. Everyone except me. Haven't caught up with the high-tech world of the instant Internet. I have a bag full of books and a writing pad. A good pen is all I need.

It's enough to bring along volumes of the poets I love bestJohn Donne, John Keats, Walt Whitman-and the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, whose questioning approach to the deep notions of existence and knowledge help keep me halfway humble. It's enough to scratch out my ideas on the pad, enough to drift off to sleep and dream unremembered dreams that quiet my mind and relax my body.

A week in Bonn with my precious daughter Zeytun. I can't wait to see her and give her a hug. Midday walks along the Rhine and thoughts of Karl Marx, who attended the ancient university in this very city and whose attraction to Jesus as a teenager attracted me to him as a graduate student intrigued by the ethical dimensions of feeling and thought.

At the end of the week, it's back to Princeton. This is my sabbatical year, but I'm returning to my home university for a joyous occasion: "Ain't that a Groove": The Genius of James Brown Conference, the first such academic assembly to take the Godfather seriously, that funkafied genius whose "Get Up Offa That Thing" lifted me high during low days at Harvard. I give the keynote address. I acknowledge that JB is integral to the formation of my spirit and my soul. I say that, like all of us, James was a featherless two-legged linguistically conscious creature born between urine and feces. Like all of us, he was born out of the funk and, like the great Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy, he was still-born. JB was abandoned by both parents, saved by an aunt, raised in a brothel, and yet, through it all-or because of it all-the man managed to transform social misery into artistic delicacies of the highest order. His funk raised us and renewed us. His funk got us through.

I'm getting through.

I'm pushing on.

I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebrationFrankie Beverly and Maze call it "Joy and Pain"-sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, in some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll. The blues got on the radio, got in the movies and went all over the world. The blues had to grow.

Like the peerless Russian writer Anton Chekhov and the matchless Irish author Samuel Beckett, the bluesmen sing of real-life, here-and-now experiences of tragedy and comedy even as they offer up help. They offer up strategies for survival. They share their coping skills. They get us to dancing and laughing, rapping and exposing the hypocrisy of a soulless and sanitized civilization.

Bluesmen aren't sanitized. Bluesmen aren't deodorized. Bluesmen are funky. Bluesmen got soul. The great blues artists-Toni Morrison, Louis Armstrong, B.B. King, Sterling Brown, Koko Taylor, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Lil' Wayne, Alvin Ailey, Curtis Mayfield, Giacomo Leopardi, Sarah Vaughan, Gwendolyn Brooks, Bruce Springsteen, Muriel Rukeyser, Savion Glover, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Thomas Hardy, Ella Fitzgerald, August Wilson, Mary J. Blige, Jacob Lawrence, Federico Garcia Lorca, Duke Ellingtonfight the good fight by doing what they can and moving on.

But what does it mean to be a bluesman in the life of the mind? Like my fellow musicians, I've got to forge a unique style and voice that expresses my own quest for truth and love. That means following the quest wherever it leads and bearing whatever cost is required. I must break through isolated academic frameworks while, at the same time, I must build on the best of academic knowledge. I must fuel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire. And most importantly, I must be a free spirit. I must unapologetically reveal my broken life as a thing of beauty.