Thursday, July 22, 2010

Jackie Kay: Red Dust Road

Radio 4’s Book of the Week is Red Dust Road, read by the author Jackie Kay. This morning’s episode told of her feelings when she visited her birth father’s ancestral village in Nigeria, where she attracted attention as a ‘white woman’ after a lifetime of being seen as black in this country.

I was reminded so vividly of Langston Hughes, who had a similar experience when he ventured to Africa as a seaman.


The great Africa of my dreams! But there was one thing that hurt me a lot when I talked with the people. The Africans looked at me & would not believe I was a Negro. You see, unfortunately I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word 'Negro' is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In Africa the word is more pure. It means all Negro, therefore black.

I am brown. My father was a darker brown. My mother an olive-yellow. On my father's side, the white blood in his family came from a Jewish slave trader in Kentucky, Silas Cushenberry, of Clark County, who was his mother's father; and Sam Clay, a distiller of Scotch descent, living in Henry County, who was his father's father. So on my father's side both male great-grandparents were white, and Sam Clay was said to be a relative of the great statesman, Henry Clay, his contemporary.

On my mother's side, I had a paternal great-grandfather named Quarles … who was white and who lived in Louisa County, Virginia, before the Civil War, and who had several colored children by a colored housekeeper who was his slave … On my maternal grandmother's side, there was French & Indian blood.
Langston Hughes: The Big Sea, An Autobiography. Hill & Wang NY 1963(1940) p11

Jackie Kay described so well how small incidents of racism seem to cluster together in the mind of the person on the receiving end, making one inclined to a kind of oversensitivity, sometimes taking offence where none perhaps was intended. But my own reading notes for ‘The Big Sea’ include the following:


The style is deceptively simple, but the structure is clever; haunting repetition. And the account of what it was like to be a negro in America is deeply affecting.

So someone has written in red biro on the title page of this [university library] copy: "F*** off Paddy W***** UM(N?)I NF." Bizarre.
[Asterisks added for blog post]

Hard not to get oversensitive when that kind of thing is around you.

A Google search for The Big Sea today produced a treasure – the original review in the New York Times of 1940 A Negro Intellectual Tells His Life Story


Posted by at
Labels: