The Paris Review - Fall 2016

What distracted you?
INTERVIEWER
REED
New York was possessed of that old European idea of respecting or even
revering the writer or the artist. I mean, if you were black in those days, you
could get by with one poem or one novel. If I had remained in New York, I
would’ve been killed by an overdose of affection. By 1974, after I published
The Last Days of Louisiana Red, I was a token in waiting. Later on, Saturday
Review even suggested I was the next Negro Whisperer, whose job is to tell
whites what those drums mean. I wrote to Saturday Review declining the
honor. It’s like somebody putting a target on your back. As an editor, I’ve
found that black, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American talent is
common. I’ve read thousands of manuscripts, put them in my magazines,
anthologies. But anyway, I left New York because I couldn’t be their token,
hanging out with Norman Mailer, having Leonard Bernstein invite me to
write the text for his Mass, appearing with Robert Lowell at Town Hall,
getting cussed out by a drunken Ralph Ellison in front of a bunch of great
artists. I said, I’m going to go to the most barbaric place in the United States.
So Carla and I went to Los Angeles.
INTERVIEWER
At the time did you feel drawn to the nationalist camp, as opposed to the
idea of multiculturalism?
REED
I broke with nationalism when people started taking seriously Elijah
Muhammad’s idea of Yakub—that the white man was a devil, not even
human. Baraka wrote a play about Yakub. Askia Touré had by then converted
Amiri to nationalism, and whenever you’d see him he’d be in African garb. I
always said you could tell the state of the political avant-garde by how Amiri
dressed. When he had a seersucker suit, he was an integrationist. Then he
put on robes and became a nationalist. Then he discarded that and went to
jeans and became a communist. But back then he was always in the robes.
Of course, he was also still coming downtown.
46