The Life and Loves of Novelist Cecil Brown
http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2008-10-09/article/31318?headline=The-Life-and-Loves-of-Novelist-Cecil-Brown
By Ken Bullock Special to the Planet
Thursday October 09, 2008
When novelist and educator Cecil Brownlongtime Berkeley resident and
teacher at Bay Area collegeswas introduced for a reading and talk he
gave a few weeks ago at Washington University in St. Louis, Prof.
Gerald Early recalled when he was in high school in the '60s, "The
three books that everybody just had to read were James Baldwin's
Another Country, John A. Williams' The Man Who Cried I Am and Cecil
Brown's The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger."
Now, Brown notes, Baldwin is dead and Williams doesn't have a major
publisher. "He isn't appreciated anymore. I've tried to review him,
and it's been hard to get the reviews published."
Brown's most celebrated book, The Life and Loves, was reissued at the
beginning of this month by North Atlantic Press in Berkeley.
Originally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1969 to great
acclaim, Brown recalled his book's reception: "Roger Straus was the
greatest publisher in the world! There were Hollywood stars at the
book party. I was on the Tonight Show, went to England ... I doubt
any African American writer today would get the accolade we got in
those days. It's dead, now. No one's interested."
Brown's books continue to get published, reprinted and garner
critical acclaim. His nonfiction book, Stagolee Shot Billy, published
in 2005 by Harvard University Press, was praised by Time Magazine,
the New York Times, the Guardian (U.K.) and in the Times Literary
Supplement. The Life and Loves has been reprinted multiple times in
Europe, Germany in particular ("But I don't usually hear about it
till later!").
With the Stagolee book, "I found the nonfiction material so
interesting, I novelized it." I, Stagolee was published in 2006, and
"there's the possibility of a film. Samuel Jackson read and liked it."
Brown, who also works with the UC Berkeley Department of Information,
developing digital education video games for 3- to 5-year-olds, has
made a video game based on the Stagolee tales for 13- to
15-year-olds, "for drop-outs," he said. "Forty-eight percent of
Alameda County's young black men drop out of high school. Violence is
such a waste of time. They need recourse to understand the structure
of racism they're involved in. And it would behoove us to find out
what in playing video games, not readingwhich about the same
percentage doesn't dois a reaction to the system making learning
boring, penalizing African Americans for a different understanding of
what is play, what is work."
Brown was born in rural North Carolina. After he and several other
students were lent a coach's car to drive to an SAT test center,
Brown received a scholarship to A & T College in Greensboro, N.C.
As a college freshman, he was influenced by an event: when Jesse
Jackson ("He was in a fraternity") came in late to class, he answered
the teacher's query of where he was by "saying he'd been across the
street at a sit-in at the Woolworth's five-and-dime, protesting that
black people couldn't eat at the lunch counter there. The teacher
turned to us and said 'the rest of you should be doing that, too.' I
was witness to that history when it really got started, and never
forgot how students could influence a country's history."
Brown later attended Columbia, publishing stories in the student
magazine. "I was writing everything I could; I always wanted to be a
novelist. I went to Europe for the first time. None of this had been
in the cards for me. I'd been a plowboy. After Columbia, it gave me
such confidence ... worldly classmates inviting me to Nantucket'Meet
my mom, she's a painter'I'd never have been accepted in such homes
in Mississippi or Georgia, and I came in the front door with their
kid, treated as an equal ... .
"That's why I feel such pain about the avenues closed to young blacks
today. Young guys don't get to hang out like that, meeting sculptors
and musicians like I did, people thinking about what to do with their
lifeand so did I."
At Columbia, Brown was encouraged to write "by LeRoi Jones, now Amiri
Baraka, who gave me a tip for an agent, and Seymour Krim, who sent me
to Evergreen Review."
Brown later attended the University of Chicago, where he witnessed
"the eruption of the Democratic National Convention, and when Martin
Luther King was assassinated, the rioting on the South Side that
spilled over into Hyde Park."
But it was with a recommendation from his Columbia teacher Mark Van
Doren's son Charles that Brown drove west "in a Cadillac, with a
couple other students" to interview for a teaching job at Modesto
Junior College.
"I took one look at Modesto and could not even stop the car. We drove
straight to Berkeley," he said.
Brown ended up teaching at Merritt College "and ran into Huey Newton
and Bobby Seale, students organizing their own curriculumand the
Black Panther Party." Brown staged his own plays at Merritt, where a
UC Berkeley professor saw them and told him he should be teaching in
the UC English Department.
At UC, Brown met Leonard Michaels, Al Young, Ishmael Reed and David
Henderson"And I added Claude Brown and Richard Pryor," who was
performing at the Mandrake in Berkeley. Brown later followed "when
Richard went down to Hollywood, working with him, being his full-time
running buddy, day-to-day," before "taking off to Berlin," where
Brown got involved in filmmaking.
Asked what influence Pryor had on himor vice versaBrown replied, "I
had such admiration for Richard. Taj Mahal claims Richard got all
these nuances he needed for his characters from me, being from the
South, Richard being from the Midwest. Like Taj, living next door to
blues players, he paid attention. He says Richard did that with me."
(As Brown was explaining this, his cellphone rang. It was Taj Mahal,
who, asked to amplify, said: "I bought a four DVD set of Richard
Pryor, and said, 'Wait a second! This cat's from Peoria, Ill., and
sounds like he's Down Southlike Cecil Brown.' You meet Cecil and see
how much Richard got from him for his characters.")
Brown's Hollywood experiences found their way into a 1982 novel, Days
Without Weather. Currently, his biography of Pryor, Kiss My Rich,
Happy, Black Ass (a remark Pryor famously made to gay leaders, with
Brown a witness) is making the rounds of publishers.
Brown returned to Berkeley in the late '80s to teach, gaining his
Ph.D. in African American Studies, Folklore and Narrative in 1993.
Currently, he's preparing a class at Stanford: Classics 130: From
Homer to Hip-Hop, on the oral tradition, studying "Greeks and Griots."
He said he believes that "with their feet in the oral tradition,
African Americans anticipated the digital age."
"No Child Left Behind is the negative onslaught of the world Marshall
McLuhan predicted in his famous Playboy interview in 1966, when he
described the conflict between the white world versus the black as
rooted in envy of a life left out for whitesand that blacks should
maintain their connection with the Africa within," Brown said. "I
want to remind the academic worldand certainly studentsof that, and
to look at what real change is."
Cecil Brown's website is www.cecilbrown.net
.
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