Black at Clare:
Introduction

A child is a small vessel for vast dreams. Like a swaddling cloth, hopes and expectations provide us with warmth, safety, and confinement. But when do our dreams become our own?

As I was hitting my academic stride in junior high school and beginning to chart my path to fulfilling my half of my mother’s dream of having two sons who were medical doctors, I also began to plot the fulfillment of a dream that I’d somehow conceived: of attending Harvard or Yale, and then Oxford or Cambridge. I didn’t know much about these universities, but one thing I did know: in American popular culture, all four were synonymous with academic excellence. Some “very smart people” had studied at Harvard and Yale. And a few of them went on to study in England, especially as Rhodes Scholars at Oxford. Could I join their ranks?

Though I grew up in a small-town West Virginia, Harvard had legendary status in my family. That’s because one of my father’s first cousins, George Lee, had graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1949, the year before I was born. In addition, his wife, Dorothy Hicks Lee, had become the first Black person—and the second woman— to earn a PhD in Comparative Literature at Harvard in 1955. Cousin George —known as “Toots” in the family—and Dorothy had hero status in the Gates family. Despite my mother’s penchant for physicians, my father wanted me to be very much like Toots; I did as well. Medicine or law, it was the Ivy League where I wished to study, and then onto Oxbridge, but the odds of doing either were so remarkably long before affirmative action opened a path for Black students to historically white colleges and universities that I assumed, especially through middle school, that I would study at Howard or at our state university, where my brother Paul was playing his own pioneering role.

George was the son of a pharmacist, whose father, John Robert E. Lee, was the president of Florida A&M University (FAMU), one of our nation’s most prestigious historically Black universities. My family connection to George was through his mother: George’s mother and my father’s father were sister and brother, two of seven children—four sons and three daughters—born to Edward Gates (1857-1945) and Maude Elaine Scott (1854-1936). The oldest child was Edward St. Lawrence Gates, my grandfather, who was born in 1879 and died in 1960, when I was 9. Extraordinarily, it was his sisters—Eugene Julian, Maude, and Lettitia—who were sent to Howard University by their parents in the early decades of the twentieth century, and it was Maude who married the pharmacist. My three great aunts’ extraordinarily rare college educations would launch a tradition of study within our family at that august university—known widely in the African American community to this day as “The Capstone of Negro Education”— that would extend down through three generations on each of their lines, as well as to my cousins also descended from my grandfather, Edward St. Lawrence Gates.

Educating one’s daughters and not one’s sons would have been quite rare for any family in the United States at that time, but it was especially unusual for a Black family. My grandfather, Edward, was kept home to run our family farm in Patterson Creek, West Virginia, and later to run a chimney sweep and janitorial business with his father in Cumberland, Maryland, just over 10 miles away. About his parents’ decision to send his sisters off to college, leaving him to tend the family’s 200-acre farm, my grandfather would remain resentful, my father once confessed to me.

George, my Ivy League hero, had grown up in Baltimore, while the other two sisters established their families in New Jersey, but each made certain that their children returned during summer vacations to be “seasoned” back on the farm, charmingly named “Sunny Side.” After the farm was sold in 1925, the children of the three sisters who had left the farm to study at Howard summered with the grandchildren of their brother Edward, at the family’s new home in the nearest city, Cumberland, located on the western part of the Potomac River, on the Maryland-West Virginia border. And, of course, weddings and funerals, as with so many families, established a tradition of a curiously regular, even though unpredictable, form of family reunion, enabling us living back at home in the hills to get to know relatives for whom “home” in the Allegheny Mountains on the South Branch of the Potomac River Valley was mainly a matter of sepia-colored nostalgia. In that way, the cousins remained fairly close, and family legends were exchanged, modified, and invented. Those stories also grew and morphed, assuming the status of legend, especially ones about the deep traditions of college education down through the various Gates family lines, and even more especially the pioneering roles that Toots and his wife Dorothy had played as two of the very few Black students who had graduated from an Ivy League college, long before Brown v Board, Rosa Parks, a very young Martin Luther King, Jr, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott were getting under way.

This astonishingly brave pair achieved this just before the dawning of the modern Civil Rights Movement, and almost four decades before “affirmative action” could possibly be imagined as the remotest possibility. In our nurturing, engulfingly supportive, and loving working-class home, sustained by the two jobs my father worked at the paper mill and as a part-time janitor at “the telephone company” in the evenings, “class” most certainly was a reflection of socio-economic realties, but it was also a product of a nurtured imagination. Those funereal family gatherings with my grandfather’s sisters, who had so mysteriously managed to escape from the family farm nestled in the hills of the Potomac River Valley, along with their children, my lively first cousins, served as fecund breeding grounds for those of us growing up in the Potomac Valley to imagine another class status, another set of lifestyle possibilities.

So that is how I came to aspire to study at an Ivy League school. I wanted to extend that sliver of a family tradition. Certainly, I wanted to make my two cousins proud. But even more, my aspiration was partly rooted in a desire, somehow, to vindicate that older brother whom his three sisters had left behind to tend the farm with his parents. How I wished that, at last, one of his offspring’s children would also make it to the Ivy League. Apparently, I wasn’t the only cousin growing up in the Valley who had secretly nurtured a similar desire: a year after I enrolled at Yale, my cousin, Stephanie Gates, would head off to Princeton. And after Stephanie graduated from Princeton, it was left to Helen Lee, like Stephanie, a sister far more than a cousin, to follow both of her parents at Harvard, first studying Psychology and Social Studies in the College and then like her father matriculating at the Harvard Law School. After practicing for a decade, she would change course, become a novelist, and gain tenure in Creative Writing down the road from Harvard at MIT.

One’s own genealogical stories, we all know so painfully well, can be about as riveting to others as your next-door neighbor’s out-of-focus home movies of their summer vacations. But I hope that this bit of family history can begin to provide some of the background for how I ended up arriving on Yale’s campus in New Haven, Connecticut, in September 1969, straight from a very small paper mill town in the hills of eastern West Virginia, one of 96 Black men and, for the first time, women – the largest group of black students ever to be admitted to Yale College. We were the Affirmative Action Generation, and quite proud of it! And Yale, by fits and starts, would lead to Cambridge, but not in a straight line.

I loved my years at Yale, especially as I began to find a passion for History in the second half of my sophomore year. After an officially sanctioned gap year, part of a brilliant, experimental program called “Five-Year B.A.,” funded by the Carnegie Corporation, during which I was able to satisfy a deep and abiding fascination with the African continent that had its roots in a fifth-grade geography class over the course of which I memorized, for reasons I cannot quite fathom, the names of the 17 new nations (and their leaders) born in 1960 in Africa’s great “Year of Independence.”

Accordingly, I cashed in my “Air Miles” (11,000, if I am recalling correctly, as the bird flies between JFK Airport and the airport in Dar es Salaam), to stop, in this order, at London, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, Athens, Tel Aviv, Addis Ababa, and Nairobi, before landing, finally, in Dar. The trip had taken about a month, with stops for a few days in each of these cities, places I had fantasized about visiting since that same geography class in fifth grade in which I had become enamored with Africa. Westminster Abbey, The Louvre, windmills in Holland and coffee shops in Amsterdam, the Colosseum and the Sistine Chapel in Rome, the Parthenon in Athens, culminating in what amounted to a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, so deeply moving to me that I began to read the Bible almost as soon as I departed—good training since I would be required to attend worship services every morning in the village along with the half dozen Australian medical missionaries with whom I would be living when I reached the Anglican Mission Hospital near the center of Tanzania where I would work as a medical assistant.) So I had a glimpse of, an introduction to, the world “above” or “beyond” race that an African American feels—or used to feel, back in the day before we began to understand the subtleties of racism(s) in guises and masks other than those to which we have so painfully and exhaustively grown accustomed.

But this was back in that day. The Yale that I had left in the summer of 1970 was torn apart by political upheaval and protest. Europe, in my previous experience, had been a blessed relief from the stress of protesting the War in Viet Nam and our protests against the fascistic militarism brought to the very perimeter of our campus when Bobby Seale, who had co-founded the Black Panthers, was on trial just a block away from my dorm room at Calhoun College. The “Revolution” wasn’t being televised; it was on our doorstep, playing itself out in living color, just a few yards from Mother Yale.

Anyway, it was quite a surprise to be identified as I traveled through Europe and the Middle East as an American first, and as a Black American, second, if at all, or so it seemed to me, an out-of-[Black] body experience. (One rather surprising reminder that I was sometimes still Black first: I was called “Kushy” in a hiker’s camp in Jerusalem, only later painfully learning what that euphemism meant. Racism’s long shadows, I was shocked to discover, had extended from the Blackness of the Kingdom of Kush out of the pages of the Bible to the Holy Land at least back then, in that summer of 1970.)

But the real shock of that year abroad on my sense of what it meant to be a “Black” person came in Africa, where the villagers, members of the Gogo people in central Tanzania, consistently referred to me as an mzungu, literally a “wanderer” in Swahili, but long employed in East Africa to describe white people! Me! Afro-coiffed, daishiki-clad me! Former Secretary of Yale’s Black Student Alliance. Me, a would-be race man. And no matter how much I protested to my new friends and neighbors, I remained, much to my despair, an mzungu. So, in Africa, much to my surprise and initial disappointment, as in Europe, my identity was first and foremost as an American even to the African sisters and brothers with whom I so longed to bond. This feeling of a certain “otherness” continued when after several months I left the village, moved to Dar es Salaam, met entirely by accident a white recent Harvard graduate, Lawrence Biddle Weeks, who had just been expelled from (then) South-West Africa (now Namibia) where he thought he could escape the notice of the secret police and aid the freedom fighters of SWAPO. Not a chance. Larry, white mzungu that he so obviously was, had been expelled shortly after his arrival, if memory serves me correctly.

Larry and I met on a dhow, a fishing boat, sailing overnight from Dar to Zanzibar. Half way through the night, with the Southern Cross spectacularly in full splendor, he confessed to me that he had long dreamed of hitchhiking from Cape to Cairo, the very same route that Cecil Rhodes had dreamed of laying railroad lines along. For my part, I confessed, in turn, that my fantasy since 5th grade was to hitchhike across the Equator, a fantasy borne of a story I’d read in Reader’s Digest, also around when I was in fifth grade, about an African boy who had someone managed to “walk across the Equator” from his village, eventually being brought by missionaries to the U.S. to embark on his education. I believe I wanted to see my own story as the reverse of his! We flipped a coin. I won. So just after Christmas, 1970, Larry Weeks and I did, in fact, travel, by land and river, from Dar es Salaam to Mombasa, to Nairobi, to Kampala, to Kigali, to Goma on Lake Kivu, to Kisangani, all by land, hitch hiking, and then sailing down the mighty Congo River for five days to Kinshasa, the capitol of then Zaire, suffering from severe amoebic dysentery for the Kisangani-Kinshasa segment of the trip. Once I recovered, down at least a dozen pounds, I’d guess, I flew to Lagos, stayed a few days, then flew over to Accra, to make a pilgrimage to W. E. B. Du Bois’s first grave, located just outside the walls of the Castle, the site of the offices of the President of Ghana. A framed photograph that I took that day hangs in my office at the Hutchins Center at Harvard. At the age of 20, I had visited, lived in, and traveled through nine African countries, if you count Zanzibar. Now, no black cultural nationalist back home could preach to me or bully me with descriptions of the way “our people do things in Africa.” I had been to the Motherland, and I had experienced much of it on the ground.

My mission complete, I flew back to Paris in April, with Charlie Parker’s “April in Paris” very much playing in my mind as I nibbled baguettes and odd-smelling cheeses, and drank a bit of wine in one of Paris’s lovely gardens, every afternoon for a fortnight, as I recovered my strength from that frightening bout of dysentery , before joining English medical student friends I had made during their all-too-short rotations in the tiny hospital at Kilimatinde.

I returned to Yale in the Fall of 1971, at age 20, to pursue a major in History. During my senior year as a Scholar of the House, I applied for every possible fellowship that would take me to Oxford or Cambridge, including, of course, the Rhodes, the Marshall, the Fulbright, the Keasby, and any other fellowship for which I was eligible, some of whose names I cannot now even remember. Since I had a strong academic record, including induction into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society at the end of my junior year, I was confident that my goal of a stint at Oxbridge was within my grasp. Too confident, as it turns out.

Though a finalist for a Rhodes and a couple of other fellowships, not one of my applications turned out to be successful, for reasons that I could not at the time understand. I had banked on a Rhodes, my fantasy fellowship since junior high school. Two of my close friends at Yale, both Black men, one in the Class of 1971 and the other in the Class of 1972, had received the Rhodes before me, and I dreamed that I would become the third component of a very special threesome, Black Yalies who cross the Atlantic to matriculate at Oxford, true academic pioneers! Because I was a finalist from my native state of West Virginia, I thought a combination of my academic performance at Yale and what we would now refer to as the “diversity boxes” I checked (African American, Appalachian) stood me in good stead for a spot from the region in which I was a finalist. And because I still entertained fantasies of becoming a doctor and a lawyer, Oxford’s PPP degree (Psychology, Philosophy, and Physiology) would afford me the chance to use the two years there to prepare for med school, after strong humanistic study at Yale. In other words, I persuaded myself, there was an academic reason for me to study at Oxford. My case, I reasoned, was tight, my motivations solid.

The Rhodes selection committee in their wisdom, however, thought otherwise, as I so very painfully realized as I stood among the eleven other finalists and failed to hear my name called as one of the anointed. It took me a few minutes to process this; after fantasizing for so many years about studying at Oxford after Yale, it turned out that I was not going to be a Rhodes Scholar after all. I stood there at first confounded, but very soon, just devastated. It didn’t take me too long to realize that my own hubris was a key barrier keeping me from fulfilling my dream, especially as this was pointed out repeatedly by my girlfriend. In fact, I actually had begun to worry about the Rhodes selection committee’s feelings about my candidacy that afternoon when I was called back for a second interview and asked if I had to choose between law and medicine, which would I choose? Thinking this a trick question – and because I genuinely wanted at the time to attend both medical school, inspired by my mother, and law school, inspired by my own family history and now the luminous example of the first Black female federal judge, Constance Baker Motley, my friend, Joel’s mother – I refused to choose. Not, apparently, a wise decision.

I thought my life was over. So overly confident was I that I hadn’t applied for admission to any law school or to a post-graduate program that would allow me to complete my pre-medical requirements. One thing I can attest for sure: applying to a graduate PhD program had never crossed my mind at this point in my education. In my despair, I didn’t realize that the door that had been slammed shut at Oxford would open another door that would, literally, redirect the course of my life. But I could not know any of this on the night, following the Rhodes debacle, when my girlfriend and I drove, broken-hearted, and largely in silence, directly from Rockefeller University in New York City down to my parents’ home in Piedmont, West Virginia, for the less than joyful holidays.

This dreadful event occurred just before our Christmas break, when all of the Rhodes Scholars are chosen in their respective districts across the country. When I returned to campus in January, I scoured the list of remaining fellowship opportunities. I was down to one: something called a Paul Mellon Fellowship, which allowed for study for two years at Clare College in Cambridge, a fellowship about which I knew absolutely nothing. To tell you the truth, I had never heard of Clare College. But since I had no other option, I decided to throw my hat into the ring. After all, what, at this point, did I have to lose? Another rejection? I did my best to prepare myself for any eventuality, and even spoke to a university administrator about possibly working in the Admissions Office for a year following graduation, during which I could collect myself, refocus, and get my bearings.

Mellon Fellows are selected by the masters of three of Yale’s twelve undergraduate colleges: Berkeley, Davenport, and Saybrook. I didn’t know this before I walked into the room, but there they sat in a semi-circle, two men and one woman. The woman was Dr. Kitty Lustman. Katherine “Kitty” Lustman became the first female Master of a Yale College when her husband, Dr. Seymour Lustman, unexpectedly died. “Mrs. Lustman” (at Yale at the time, the custom was to refer to all of our professors as Mr or Mrs, it was explained to us, to avoid embarrassing anyone who had not yet taken the PhD) was the Director of the Yale Child Study Center Nursery School, an organization formed in the wake of Yale’s moratorium on teaching in April 1970, followed a few weeks later by the May Day Strike against the Viet Nam War, sparked by the bombing of Cambodia. The initiative to create “a developmentally informed day care center at Yale” was sparked, in fact, by the foresight of Kurt Schmoke, who would become the first leg of that Black Oxford/Rhodes triangle that I so longed to join. I felt a certain sympathy from her as I sat down, petrified, because of a brief conversation that I had had with the candidate who had immediately preceded me, as he left his interview.

He emerged from the conference room so very excited! He burst into conversation about how eager he was to go to Cambridge to study English Literature, under Professor This and Professor That, and how the strengths of the English Faculty there fit so perfectly with the preparation he had received at Yale. Cambridge was the perfect match for him, and he had conveyed that fact and obviously his enthusiasm to the selection committee.

I was sunk. Once again, I thought, rejection awaited on the other side of that closed door..

A bit numb, I entered the room where the three Masters awaited to decide my fate. Since the outcome was already a foregone conclusion, I decided to change course completely from the failed tactics I had employed for my several other fellowship interviews. Mrs. Lustman’s welcoming manner was so very comforting and inviting that I decided simply to admit the truth.

I had no idea what I would study at Cambridge, I began. I believe I saw a few shocked expressions among my interrogators. The reason I wanted to go to Cambridge, I continued, was to have the opportunity to see myself, as an African American in another predominantly white society, one without America’s long and torturous history of slavery, Jim Crow, and de jure segregation. I shared with them the many things that James Baldwin had expressed about the liberating feeling a Black person has as soon as they step foot in Europe. I had read his pivotal essay, “A Stranger in the Village,” many, many times by now, in a variety of contexts. In fact, I believe that it was the very first essay of his—or, for that matter—the very first essay by a Black author—that I had ever read, back at the Peterkin Episcopal Church Camp in August of 1965, at the height of the Watts Riots.

As Baldwin had put it in another essay he published in 1961 called “The New Lost Generation,” “what Europe still gives the American expatriate is the sanction, if one accepts it, to become oneself.” And as he put it in Notes of a Native Son, published in 1955, the first book of his I ever read, “In America, the color of my skin had stood between myself and me; in Europe, that barrier was down. Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. It turned out that the question of who I was was not solved because I had removed myself from the social forces which menaced me—anyway, these forces had become interior, and I had dragged them across the ocean with me. The question of who I was had at last become a personal question, and the answer was to be found in me.”

I wanted to find this answer in, and for, myself. I longed for the opportunity to play this out, to test Baldwin’s thesis, to learn where “race,” and ultimately the self, started and stopped. England would give me that chance, I hoped. I longed to share James Baldwin’s experience as an American expatriate—indeed, as a Black Expatriate living for two years outside of the cauldron of race relations in America. Through what must have been a torrent of words, I told all of this to the three assembled auditors, gathered to judge my fate, who by this point, I noticed, were listening keenly as I spoke. I pressed on.

I had not rehearsed this approach or these words, but my feelings had found form, in a marriage of sentiment, language, and thought, with Mr. Baldwin as my anchor. I was, as it is so glibly said, speaking from the heart. Since all of my previous “brilliant” strategies for securing an Oxbridge fellowship had failed, it was, after all, the only thing left for me to do. But I realized this only in retrospect; at that moment, I was just desperate to have my say, in my own words, even if it meant disaster, as I assumed it would, especially given the previous interviewee’s well-reasoned and extremely well-researched program for study at Cambridge, and given my recent experiences at failing to receive any of the several fellowships for which I had applied to fulfill my long-held Oxbridge dream.

This would not be my first visit to Europe, or to England, I continued, now beginning to pivot to my time in another village, an African village, about as far away from Piedmont and New Haven as that Swiss village had been from the Harlem that produced James Baldwin. For my experiences traveling through Europe in the summer of 1970 to make sense to the course of study I was proposing, I realized as I was blabbering on, I had to take the selection committee members back to the time I had spent in Africa—and, at doubtless excessive length, I recounted that enervating, invigorating, edifying experience.

Having had the opportunity, I rushed to conclude, of experiencing myself as a Black American in Europe and Israel briefly, and in Africa for an extended period, now I wanted to spend time in England to be able to look at myself—my “racial” self, as it were—to see how that, to use contemporary parlance, had been “socially constructed,” though I didn’t know these words at that time. I wanted, I said, to be able to look at myself through a different lens, in this case, an English and a Cantabrigian lens, and then compare the experience of having done that in Africa with the result in England—in an England where, as best as I could compute, the “coloured” population was substantially smaller than it was in the United States; an England where the history of slavery had been vastly, dramatically different, an England where the majority of the Black population descended from relatively recent immigrants, most from Jamaica and other parts of the British colonial Caribbean. That is why I wanted this fellowship. Oh, and two years at Cambridge would also allow me to complete those elusive pre-med requirements, I threw in at the last minute, because I desperately wanted to believe it, but also, truth be told, for good effect. After all, I had to find some academic reason to be allowed to study at Clare College! And with that, the interview was over.

At 4:00 pm that day, the phone call came, I think from the Master of Berkeley College, Robert Triffin. I only remember the word “congratulations,” and then my girlfriend and me hugging each other and crying, as she began to prepare a special dinner to celebrate, both of us suddenly with quite mixed emotions that this fellowship would take us far away from each other for at least for two years, just when we were hitting our stride as a couple. Mrs. Lustman’s sympathetic listening had apparently carried the day, a blessing for which I was able to thank her on several occasions, when following my two years at Clare, I returned to Yale, eventually to complete the writing of my PhD dissertation and become a tenure-track member of the faculty in the English Department and the Program in Afro-American Studies.

So that’s how I ended up a Mellon Fellow reading English at Cambridge and not reading PPP at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. And this is where this genuine saga of the next exhilarating chapter of my intellectual and, yes, spiritual journey began. In Africa, I had learned, or so it seemed, that nationality had trumped race, at least among “the people” (among Pan-African-minded intellectuals it was quite a different matter, as one might expect). In England, I would soon enough observe that perhaps it was class that trumped race as I watched my new friend, Kwame Anthony Appiah, seamlessly navigate his way through even the most elite and exclusive clubs and societies at Cambridge, despite his brown Anglo-Ghanaian face. But that is part of another story.

Let me try to bring this essay, much too long already, to a close by summarizing what happened to me when I arrived at Clare. I could very well entitle it “A Strange Thing Happened to Me on the Way to Medical School.” After an extended and intense tour of the campus, during which I learned that Sir Francis Bacon, John Milton, Sir Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin had matriculated at Cambridge (Milton and Darwin in Christ’s College in 1624 and 1828, respectively, and Bacon in 1573 and Newton in 1661 in Trinity College), and that Milton had not actually written Paradise Lost “whilst lying under” the proverbial mulberry tree in Christ’s College, I have to confess, as I imagine many another student before me had, that I felt as if I had been drenched in a deluge of academic genius and tradition. The feeling was exhilarating, overwhelming, and profoundly humbling. So, this is what Harvard and Yale have all along aspired to embody and extend, I remember thinking. Perhaps, in retrospect, the nucleus of the idea of becoming an academic began to form that day.

I think what impressed me most was the fact that intellectuals—scholars, writers, thinkers— enjoyed pride of place in Cambridge’s past, and not professionals or politicians, necessarily, though their achievements were, of course, celebrated, too, like Oliver Cromwell (matriculating in 1616) and William Pitt the Younger (1773). Though no doubt my fault, focused as so many of my friends and I were on entering the professions, I had somehow missed a similar degree of veneration for the long tradition of scientists, scholars, and writers back at Yale, such brilliant and original thinkers and writers as Eli Whitney and Noah Webster, Thornton Wilder, James Fenimore Cooper, and America’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature, Sinclair Lewis, though I had been made keenly aware of Yale’s tradition of extraordinary politicians, such as the 27th President of the United States, William Howard Taft (the first to graduate from Yale, but not the last). So to come to Cambridge and be confronted with the legends of Milton, Newton, and Darwin? I confess that I had never imagined this trio studying as undergraduates in actual classrooms before. At the end of that tour of the campus, I was felt a bit like Dorothy: Kansas was an ocean away.

After thumbing through the Cambridge University course catalogue seemingly endlessly, I reduced the possible subjects which I might “read” to three subjects: Philosophy, The History of Art, and finally English. In ways my new friend, Anthony Appiah tried to prepare me for, my interview with the Philosophy tutor at Clare, Mr. Tim Smiley, was short and not exactly sweet, as He kindly asked if I had studied any Philosophy at Yale, and I told him that I had taken a course entitled “Introduction to Ethics,” taught by one of Yale’s all-too-few female professors, “Miss” Patricia James, one of the most subtly inspiring teachers I’ve ever encountered in a classroom. In Dr. James’s class, we had studied the works of a variety of philosophers, ranging from Plato and Aristotle (good), Berkeley and Kierkegaard (half-good), to Sartre and Camus (most definitely not good). After I had mentioned those last two, Mr. Smiley suggested that I might find a happier home in the Romance Language Department. I acknowledged that he was probably right and rose to end our meeting.

The Art History tripos was decidedly “Eurocentric” (not sure what I was expecting), as noted as I read course titles such as “Architecture in Italy from Bramante to Palladio,” “Raphael and His Circle” “Neo-Classical Architecture in Europe c. 1750-c. 1840,” and “Titian and His Contemporaries” during the Renaissance. What about the other Renaissance? So I mused as I kept paging through the course catalogue, since we had studied the Harlem Renaissance a few times in different Afro-American Studies classes back at Yale, especially in Robert Farris Thompson’s legendary History of Art lecture course, “From Africa to the Black Americas.” But Cambridge’s Art History Department hadn’t received the news as yet that the visual and plastic arts of Sub-Saharan African might be studied as art and not only as ethnology or anthropology. Since I had purchased my first works of African art—Makonde Art, in Dar es Salaam, back in 1970—I had thought it might be fun to study African Art formally, while attempting to fulfill at long last those rapidly receding pre-med requirements with supplemental tutorials (I would take courses in Biology, Chemistry, and a partial one in Physics at Clare over the next two years). So the Department of the History of Art, just like Romance Languages, was not going to be a possibility. That left English.

What unfolded next turned out to be a gloss on the immortal words of the soul singer, Percy Sledge, probably based on an old African American Spiritual: “When least expected, Fate stumbled in.” As I was struggling to learn even the fundamentals of what was called at Cambridge “Practical Criticism,” the close reading of literary texts to identify their formal properties beyond their manifest themes, I wondered if anyone at Cambridge had studied African mythology. I was directed to Professor John “Jack” Goody, who became the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology in 1973, the year I went up to Cambridge. He had just published his now classic work, The Myth of the Bagre, the year before, a copy of which he kindly gave me when we met. Professor Goody casually mentioned that a Nigerian playwright was a visiting fellow at Churchill College, and I might wish to speak with him before deciding how to proceed with this interest of mine. He was in self-imposed exile from Nigeria, after publishing a book, The Man Died: Prison Notes, two years before about his imprisonment for 27 months during the Nigerian (Biafran) Civil War between 1967 and 1969, 24 of those months, I would learn from him, in solitary confinement. And though his appointment had been denied by the English Faculty, Professor Goody told me, I could study with him through the Social Anthropology Department instead. And so, I dropped a note to Professor Soyinka in the university mail (no telephones in our rooms in those days!).

Working under the tutelage of Professor Soyinka, in parallel with a budding friendship with the two other Black students at Clare, O.A. “Dapo” Ladimeji and Kwame Anthony Appiah (and with another student who would turn out to be a lifelong friend, Ronald Edward Frederick Kimera Muwenda Mutebi II, the future Kabaka of the Kingdom of Buganda) in retrospect, sounded the death knell for that fantasy career of my mother’s and mine of a life given over to service in medicine. As the only three Black students at Clare, Dapo, Anthony, and I found each other rather quickly, and submerged ourselves in lively discussions and heated debates about Pan-Africanism and the international Black Experience, as it were. Though I had majored in American political history back at Yale, I had taken a few courses in Afro- American Studies, and I had that year abroad in Africa to draw upon, as I did my very best to keep up with Dapo and Anthony in discussions about contemporary African politics and culture. Perhaps the height of that first year at Cambridge was Wole’s invitation to Dapo and me to form the audience of a reading of a play he had written while at Churchill. It was called “Death and the King’s Horseman.” Thirteen years later, the Swedish Academy would choose this play to be highlighted in its press release announcing Wole’s selection as the first Black writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. But it was the full immersion that Wole gave me, fortnightly, in African literature and art, and more especially Yoruba mythology and art, that awakened in me the dream—just the slightest glimmer at first—that what I most longed to be was a person of letters, someone who devoted his life to reading, writing, and teaching about the African and African American Experience, as we simplistically liked to say back then.

And then came the dinner, an Indian meal, with lots of good wine and lots of hot, spicy food that I had never tasted before. Wole and Anthony waited until I had consumed entirely too much wine as I attempted, in vain, to cool my burning tongue from the tortures effected by Wole’s secret chili pepper formula that he had sagaciously christened “Engine Oil,” to tell me the purpose of this dinner. They had summoned me, they said, to tell me that it was time that I gave up this crazy idea that I was going to study medicine, when it had been apparent, to them, all along that what I really was meant to do, and what I really wanted to do, was to teach and write about the African diaspora. I was stunned. And I was deeply moved, doing my very best, despite the fact that that wine had lowered my defenses, not to cry. I knew they were right, but I didn’t know if I had the talent and the will to embark on such a dramatic departure from all that I had dreamed of doing as a career since elementary school, basically. I hardly slept that night. The truth is that my two counselors had named the dreams that had become my own.

A man of letters? A professor? English? African and African American Studies? Such possibilities had never occurred to me, at least consciously, until I went up to Cambridge, and until I became passionate about the study of literature and, more especially, about the study of African and African American literature and culture under Wole Soyinka’s tutelage. Meanwhile, I had plunged into the English Tripos, doing my level best to understand how to explicate a text, how to engage with a text’s formal properties beyond its surface level content, learning about Practical Criticism with the help of my fellow Clare student and lifelong friend, Michael Richards, and reading for the Tragedy Paper with George Steiner and to a lesser extent, with Raymond Williams. I began to read widely in these new and fascinating fields of literary criticism and literary theory, encountering books and essays by professors of literature not at Cambridge, works such as Professor Helen Vendler’s dazzling close readings, her books on Yeats’s Vision and the Latter Plays (1963), Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’s Longer Poems (1969), and especially her penetrating essay on I.A. Richards and Shakespeare in a festschrift she edited in his honor in 1973, a year before Richards would return to Cambridge to lecture after many decades on the faculty at Harvard. (One of the great honors and surprises of my professional life would be to join the Harvard English Department in 1991 when Helen was the department’s sole University Professor. She has been a continuing inspiration as a Practical Critic, in Richard’s memorable phrase, and beloved friend ever since.)

In my own work, which I would pursue for the remainder of my career, it was here that I first encountered the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, the “Mother” of both the Anglo-African and the African American literary traditions, whose works would become the site of contention in the Enlightenment’s troubled, muddled discourse over the African’s “place in Nature” as judged within the context of European definitions of “The Arts and Sciences,” and especially the role of poetry among the arts. Reflecting on the Enlightenment assessments of the significance of Wheatley’s work and, indeed, of her very being, as well as the work of her Anglo-African and African American contemporaries, would become the subject of my PhD dissertation in the English Faculty, and remain an intellectual passion that abides to this very day.

But it was my supervisions with Wole and the wide range of texts that we read together—Yoruba oriki, D.O. Fagunwa’s Forest of a Thousand Daemons, Japanese Noh theatre, The Greeks, especially Euripides, his favorite, I think, and whose Bacchae he adapted; Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poet in New York, his astonishingly penetrating tragedies and his statement about the nature and function of the mythopoeic tradition in Spain, “Theory and Play of the Duende;” Hegel and Nietzsche on Tragedy; so many plays by Brecht; Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons; Leopold Senghor’s collected poetry and this theories of “Négritude,” Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land; Franz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth; and, above all else, Shakespeare, of course. I could go on. I read these texts deliriously. And deep down, I began to dream of the life of the mind; slowly I realized that I wanted to continue this kind of work and make my living at it. But could I? And what would I say to my parents, especially to my mother? What about law and psychiatry? Could I be admitted into the PhD program in the English Faculty, after only one year? With the encouragement of the English Tutor at Clare, Dr. John Newton, I took the first-year exams, then decided to apply to the PhD program. When the Chair of the Faculty, Professor John Holloway, told me that he would supervise my work if, in exchange, I would teach him something about the Blues, I knew I was in the right place at the right time. Had Professor Holloway not agreed to supervise my thesis, I would not have been admitted into the PhD program.

And the rest, as they say….All because of the accident of arriving at The University of Cambridge at the same time as Kwame Anthony Appiah and Wole Soyinka. My friendship with these two has only grown more deeply and profoundly over the last 49 years. They are the godfathers of my two daughters; they are my closest, oldest friends. “I could write a book,” as the saying goes! Their work inspires me to try to be better, to try to do more in our field. I aspire to their level of insight and eloquence, even if those are goals that I could never reach. I think Horace, in Odes 1.13, provides a most fitting way to describe my indebtedness to, and my affection for, those brothers in spirit, Wole and Anthony, to whom I owe my career. It is a passage inscribed on the Class of 1857 Gate at Harvard, recently brought back to me in the Latin Salutatorian address by Caroline Engelmayer, Class of 2020, at the Harvard Commencement held on May 29, 2022:

And on that last day, at the end of term, at the conclusion of that exhilarating first year at Clare, Wole, heading down to Ghana to assume the editorship of Transition Magazine, summoned me over to Churchill to say goodbye, and left me with two gifts: Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Guide to Wine, to encourage my larger education in the sublime art of oenology to which he had become, and remains, my guide, and a plastic bottle of medicated baby powder, to cushion the lingering effect of that Engine Oil of his to which, by now, I had become hopelessly addicted. I feared that he, Kwame, and I would never see each other again. But this would only be the beginning.