Professor Thadious Davis, who taught the only English class I have taken at Penn, easily ties among the 3 best professors I have ever had. The others are Kate Jenckes (Romance Languages @ U. Michigan) and Roger Lane (emeritus in History @ Haverford Coll.) I'm so happy to have taken this class ... it makes me excited about what teaching can be. Honestly, the syllabus and bibliography are so well thought-out that even a daydreamer like me was able to soak up a lot. Also, I was happy to achieve at least one of my goals going in: to be forced to read one bag-full of novels by black writers so that I can feel a little bit less embarrassed by that gaping lacuna in my education !!
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In the last few days, I found myself for no particular reason reminded of the MOVE bombing incident in Philadelphia in 1985. I guess it wasn’t for “no reason.” I have been trying to decide which mayoral candidate I would vote for in the Democratic primary in two weeks. In particular, I couldn’t help but think of the various candidates and which sector of Philadelphia they represent; Bob Brady really embodies a lot of things – good and bad – that I associate with the area of South Philadelphia where I live. Dwight Evans represents, apparently, a part of Northwest Philadelphia that I am unfamiliar with. Chakah Fattah represents West Philadelphia. I was initially drawn to Fattah, both to his national politics (strictly anti-war, pro-educational opportunity) and also to the idea that he is a person who can move between spheres, … or at least that was the impression I had of the West Philly politician who gave frequent talks at Penn.
When I was thinking about this, about the different Philadelphias I had known (I was a student in a college on the Main Line in the late 90s and have lived in a couple of different neighborhoods in the city), I was sitting in a Ninth Street café across the street from an immense mural of the former tough-guy mayor Frank Rizzo. All of these candidates – it seemed to me – are products of his time, and of the city politics and racial politics of the Philadelphia 60s, 70s, and 80s. These are the cultural images that loom large: Italian immigrants, Rocky, Rizzo’s strong hand, Philadelphia soul music, Cecil B. Moore and the desegregation of Girard College, the jailing of the MOVE 9 in the late 70s and the bombing in 1985.
I was frustrated with myself. I knew a lot about the Philadelphia “spheres,” but really all my impressions are hazy, and maybe even stereotyped. What did happen here? What is represented by the Center City renovations and by the men – John Street and Ed Rendell – who started the so-called “turn-around” of downtown? I knew that Rendell had been the DA during the MOVE 9 prosecutions, and that in some ways the "Mumia" case colors his stance on the death penalty today. When in college, I went to the Mumia marches, and laid down on the Philadelphia sidewalks when Street proposed his sidewalk behavior bill to make life tougher for the homeless. I feel compelled to look into the past of these men, and in their geography, refracted historically through Philadelphia milestones, to figure out who they are. Rendell is an East Falls guy, where my fiancée once lived and where I spent many nights. I like that neighborhood, but maybe I don’t see that "sphere" as the real public face of Philly any more than South Philadelphia. Was it the walks by the theater where Grace Kelly once performed that threw me off?
That was Saturday. On Sunday I drove out to the 6200 block of Osage for the first time after knowing this city for 10 years. Just as people say, the houses constructed by the city look very different from surrounding blocks that where not destroyed in the bombing-fire. And, indeed, some of the houses are boarded up. The lawsuits alleging the City’s non-compliance with their warranties to keep the homes in good condition are still active; Street does not want to pay the full amount of the original settlement. But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about the fact that the neighborhood had been described as “Black Middle Class” in accounts I read. I’m not sure I even know what that means historically for Philadelphia, if I even know now. Who were these neighbors of MOVE who lost their homes and possessions? What would someone like Fattah or Evans have been doing at that time and what would they have to say? Doesn’t their relationship to these “spheres” of Philadelphia have a lot to do with who they are? As much as what they promise for the future?
I was shocked, because I did not know, to read online that the mayor at the time was Philadelphia’s first black mayor, Wilson Goode, and not Rizzo, whose mural had made me think of taking the trip in the first place. What was Goode’s relationship to a (surely) Rizzo-influenced police force (He was the former chief and that was his base of influence, into the 90s)? What would be the relationship between any black or white mayor and the police force now?
After I got back I read online Alice Walker’s essay about the bombing (http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/MOVE-Alice-Walker1988.htm). It was sort of serendipitous (as I simultaneously read Shay Youngblood's Black Girl in Paris) to find myself reading this essay written from Paris by a writer who confesses to know little about Philadelphia. But her reading of the event from a distance is fascinating: “There we stood on a street corner in Paris, reading between the lines. It seems MOVE people never combed their hair, but wore it in long 'ropes' that people assumed were unclean.” Says Walker, “this is also how we wear out hair, we recognize this ‘weird’ style: dreadlocks.” Who is “we”? Walker and whoever she is standing with? The blacks (“and adventuresome whites”) of Paris? Walker’s reading turns the radical MOVE residents into brothers and sisters of hippies and free-thinkers. It incorporates them ideologically into a “sphere” not inhabited by their middle-class black neighbors in Philadelphia. It is a sphere that the protagonist "Eden" of Black Girl also goes to Paris to come to know, so that she can “finish a story [she] stared long ago,” so that she can say to herself what she always knew: “I have grown up into the kind of woman who wants to live fast and die young and handsome like my father, whom I love in spite of his sins” (133).
For this novelist, Paris is indeed a good site from which to find love by moving through spheres (upper class, working class, shoplifting squatter, musicians, Professor “May Day’s” bohemians) in order to distill from their elements the “sins” to be most highly regarded in herself and in others, in order to construct a sphere-of-solidarity among members of all these groups. I find in her perspective something of Walker’s honesty when she says that had she been a neighbor of the MOVE house, “I probably wouldn’t have been able to live next door to them for a day.” Yet she undoubtedly – from Paris – feels a kinship to their rejection of American consumerism.
I wonder how Walker’s essay would stand up to Houston Baker’s critique in “Cultural Memory and the Black Public Sphere." (It was also somewhat coincidental that Baker should name Charles Barkley, who was playing ball here in Philadelphia during the 80s). Is her elocution from the site of liberal Paris an episode of critical memory when it evokes “hippies” and the implied 60s/70s-style progressivism in conjunction with the optimism evoked by a black community of the ideas that “intelligently” (if problematically) envisions radical responses to American culture?
This would certainly seem to be the case when she mentions “middle-class whites and blacks who think all poor black people should be happy with jherri curls, mindless (and lying) TV shows, and Kentucky fried chicken.” The temporal dimension of moving from dreadlocks to jherri curls is unmistakable, even though she does not specifically cite time periods.
Or is this nostalgia? Walker allies herself with the MOVE neighbors in saying that she would not have been able to tolerate the rats and the late-night bullhorn shouting either, but also makes them symbolic of a stereotyped black culture of the 80s worth rejection, from 6221 Osage or from Paris.
It might be a little of both. I’m wondering about ways that this treatment of spheres – temporal, spatial, and cultural – can be used as a map for reflecting on another kind of narrative, like that the one Fattah makes of his autobiography on his website (http://www.phillyforfattah.com/about_fattah.asp): growing up with gang members in his house that his family worked to reform, convincing a bank (when he was 14, apparently) to donate property to the project, turning down a Harvard Masters to serve in the Pennsylvania State Senate, going to Washington. It’s a fascinating and admirable … and interesting in the sense that in both texts and images it focuses on the 1970s and 80s, the period that most seems to speak to Fattah’s double-pedigree, similar to the one Baker paints for Martin Luther King, Jr.
Youngblood’s Eden has to move through different spheres in order to complete her artistic and sexual biography, in order to know what she already knew in order to write it. In order that she might assume a place that allows her to bear her contradictions in a way that is productive and confident, like James Baldwin. Fattah constructs a different kind of biography, but one similar in the sense that the earlier spheres make sense of the later ones, make this man a complete package and (he hopes) a resonant voice for the city of Philadelphia.
FYI-- For another entry where I claim the social justice high-horse, see http://turismodevidas.blogspot.com/2005/06/el-pueblo-no-se-vende.html.
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