Perry Hall, Restless Seeker

“For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length--and there I travel looking, looking breathlessly.”

from The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Carlos Castaneda, University of California Press, 1968

Perry Alonzo Hall, Jr., my friend and comrade for more than 50 years, died this past April. Born September 15, 1947, Perry filled many roles in life. Father, brother, activist, musician, storyteller, truthteller, scholar and author, Perry was also a relentless voyager across both terrestrial geographies and interior spaces.

He was raised up in the Brewster Projects in Detroit by parents Phyllis and Perry Alonzo Hall, Sr., along with siblings Charles, Emily, Harriet, Arthur and Patricia and, sometimes, half-brother Norman. Much of Perry’s childhood was spent in a neighborhood with a rich culture shaped by many successful Black businesses and local musicians who were themselves among the most revered musicians in the country. Perry, or Lonnie, as his family called him, graduated from Detroit’s Northern High School as senior class valedictorian in 1965.

Beginning as an undergraduate on a full academic scholarship at the University of Michigan, Perry was one of the first generation of Black students who aggressively pushed majority white colleges and universities for courses that acknowledged the reality of Black life in the United States. As Perry wrote later, the courses he took in sociology, history and literature when he first entered college, “failed in their ability to encompass our realities.”

In a two-year hiatus from academia, Perry hitchhiked across the country a number of times, sometimes doing so under the influence of consciousness-altering experiences and substances, He and I spent the summer of 1971 in Detroit working at Ed Bowyer’s Insight Magazine. (I wrote about that summer in The Spirit of Phyllis Hall.)

The first issue of Insight featured a cover illustration of Detroit’s iconic statue, the Spirit of Detroit, tying off an arm and shooting up. Needless to say, that graphic depiction of the heroin scourge destroying African American neighborhoods, was not universally appreciated.

Perry and I were also part of the Insight team that conducted a group interview of Black Detroit-area Vietnam veterans, faithfully recording their raw and poignant battlefield stories, their outrage over the lack of jobs for returning veterans, and the decline and abandonment of minority neighborhoods in the city. While at the magazine, Perry met Geneva Smitherman (author of Talkin and Testifyin, The Language of Black America and Black Talk, Words and Phrases From the Hood to the Amen Corner), who would become a valued colleague and friend in his subsequent career in African American Studies.

Later, as a doctoral student at the Harvard University School of Education, as acting director of the Wayne State University Center for Black Studies, as a lecturer at the University of Alabama Birmingham and, finally, for 28 years a tenured faculty member at the University of North Carolina, Perry continued the fight to legitimize and expand the field of African American Studies as a fully enfranchised, academic department.

As part of Wayne State’s institutional marginalization of Black Studies, the Center never became a full academic department while Perry was there. And though he replaced Geneva Smitherman as director of the Center, the university never elevated him from “acting” to full and permanent director. It is this career of struggling against white resistance and bureaucratic inertia, while compiling a record of intellectual achievement, that Perry recounted in his book, In the Vineyard, Working in African American Studies.

Academically Perry paid particular attention “to the importance of folk, popular, or traditional forms of expressive culture in understanding the overall context of black life in any given historical moment,” as he wrote in In the Vineyard. “The core of African-based orality on which folk/popular culture is based suggests that oral forms such as music can tell about more aspects of the story of black people than customary literary sources alone.”

A musician, himself, Perry would sit down at every piano he encountered on his journey through life, playing pieces across the full range of Black music, loving, especially blues, gospel, R&B and Motown. I’ve been married twice and at both weddings Perry took over the piano, playing tunes like Stormy Monday and Stevie Wonder’s I Just Called to Say I Love You and I Heard It Through the Grapevine--the original Marvin Gaye version, of course.

But it was his childhood spent in Detroit immersed in a city where blues, R&B and Motown thrived, and where he played the piano at family gatherings, which featured all forms of gospel, holiday and responsive singing, that created Lonnie’s readiness to both believe in and investigate Black music traditions as a primary means of shaping African American communities and culture. And the strengths and talents of his multi-generational family also inspired Lonnie to undertake the work of researching and writing the history of the Beard and Hall family and sharing that story at both small and large gatherings of the clan in which he came to assume the role of griot.

As an adult, Perry was also a friend and colleague united in solidarity with a multi-racial, multi-cultural universe of working folks, artists and scholars. No one worked harder to make himself clear about complex matters than Perry. He was sometimes disappointed when people couldn’t quite grasp the details of what he was trying to tell them, but he never stopped focusing and refining his message so that others might understand what mattered.

It was Perry who first explained to me the idea that it was the exploitation of African American labor and the expropriation of their wealth that undergirded white privilege in the United States. He had to school me many times on that point before I came to understand the full meaning of what he was sharing with me. I’ve started rereading In the Vineyard since Perry died and when I get deep into it, I can still hear Perry’s voice and I know that in his writing I will be able to hear him always. Our past together will never really be over.

“What constructive ways can be fashioned to engage the abundant energies that hip-hop culture has collectivized among much of our youth? Will the soul-transforming of that folk/popular tradition emerge once again to redeem their future? .... As the discourse continues among schools of thought in field, it will be incumbent upon the participants to frame the discussion in terms of the opportunities and challenges that now confront us. It is this ground, inscribed with a catalog of critical issues facing black communities in the United States and elsewhere in the African diaspora at this critical historical juncture, upon which African American Studies now stands. And it is this ground over which it must tread on a road that leads through the end of this century and into the next millennium.”

from In the Vineyard, Working in African American Studies, Perry A. Hall, University of Tennessee Press, 1999.

Toni Morrison will endure

The whites didn’t bear speaking on. Everybody knew.

I’m a seventy-two-year-old straight white male, born into an upper middle-class Jewish household. I dropped out of college in 1966 and spent at least the next three decades recklessly squandering some of the advantages my array of privileges created for me and discovering the multitude of ways that those same privileges nevertheless would manifest to rescue me. Would I have escaped quite as many fraught situations relatively unscathed if I had been gay or female or of color? Probably not, but it’s a certainty that I have not earned all the do-overs that life has granted me.

Regardless, over the years it has become increasingly clear to me that however impossible it might be to evade my white-skin privilege, I need to find productive ways to reckon with it, to understand it, and to use it, wherever and whenever possible, for good. Ultimately, that means to me that I should learn how to be an anti-racist, to stand forthrightly against the white supremacist culture of our country.

A variety of life experiences, including my friendships and work relationships with black folks (see most especially my tribute to Phyllis Hall, her son Perry, and the rest of her family in "The Spirit of Phyllis Hall"), the energizing effects of the moral and political courage of leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, and numerous lessons learned from writers like Richard Wright (Black Boy, Native Son)Manning Marable (How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America), Bryan Stephenson (Just Mercy), bell hooks, Edward Baptist (The Half Has Never Been Told), Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns), James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Tupac Shakur, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Amari Baraka, Roxane Gay, poet Brian Gilmore, Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison and many others, have been instrumental in leading me to the conclusion that standing aside from the struggle against white supremacy would be the ultimate in privileged behavior; and, also, because our collective lives, impoverished by a society that absolutely refuses to recognize the humanity of people of color as equal in every way to that of “white” people, white supremacy injures us all. It deprives us of the full range of achievement and invention that would enhance every aspect of our lives together, and sentences us to shared fear, anxiety and misery. In such a world—in this world—anti-racism and active opposition to white supremacy is a fundamental first step in getting to a truly just society. I will go even further than that to say that I don’t believe that our country can right itself, can address other truly urgent problems, like climate change and disastrously underfunded public education, without also dismantling white supremacy.

I don’t know when I first discovered Toni Morrison, but it was probably around 1971 or 1972 when I came across a paperback copy of The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel. I have since read three or four other books by Morrison, both The Bluest Eyeand Belovedmore than once. Most recently, just before Morrison died, I’d begun rereading Belovedfor the third time, in the process coming full on the understanding, maybe for the first time, that straight, white males were not the audience that Morrison had in mind when she sat down to write. In fact, this time around I felt like a spectator —a voyeur, perhaps— watching while Morrison told a wise and important story for the benefit of all her beautiful babies, her African American readers, who would have both an instinctive grasp of the story she told, and would move on from the story with a richer understanding of the weaknesses and strengths, of the trials and burdens and transcendent beauty of black folks, in the land of white supremacy and African American dauntlessness.

I cannot say how the United States gets from where we are now, with a president whose banalities, crudities and cruelties are so deeply rooted in racism and privilege, to a place where our biggest gifts—our multiculturalism, our collective creativity, inventiveness and profound sense of community, and our fundamental human desire to do good—define a United States where equal justice prevails, but I am certain that it would help for us to read more Toni Morrison.

I submit the following quotations from Belovedfor the benefit of those who need to be enticed to pick up one of Morrison’s books and read through to the end. I further submit that Morrison’s work is certain to lead most readers to the inevitable conclusion that four centuries of travail have equipped black folks to lead the way to that place where equal justice prevails; a lesson that white folks need to learn over and over again if we are to reach the promised land.

Passages from Toni Morrison’s Beloved:

Paul D “…recognized the careful enunciation of letters by those, like himself, who could not read but had memorized the letters of their name. He was about to ask her who her people were but thought better of it. A young colored woman who was drifting was drifting from ruin. He had been in Rochester four years ago and seen five women arriving with fourteen female children. All their men—brothers, uncles, fathers, husbands, sons—had been picked off one by one by one. They had a single piece of paper directing them to a preacher on DeVore Street. The war had been over four or five years then, but nobody white or black seemed to know it. Odd clusters and strays of Negroes wandered the backroads and cow paths from Schenectady to Jackson. Dazed but insistent, they searched each other out for word of a cousin, an aunt, a friend who once said, ‘Call on me. Anytime you get near Chicago, just call on me.’ Some of them were running from family that could not support them, some to family; some were running from dead crops, dead kin, life threats, and took-over land. Boys younger than Buglar and Howard; configurations and blends of families of women and children, while elsewhere, solitary, hunted and hunting for, were men, men, men. Forbidden public transportation, chased by debt and filthy ‘talking sheets,’ they followed secondary routes, scanned the horizon for signs and counted heavily on each other. Silent, except for social courtesies, when they met one another they neither described nor asked about the sorrow that drove them from one place to another. The whites didn’t bear speaking on. Everybody knew.”

 Pg. 52-53

“This girl Beloved, homeless and without people, beat all, though he couldn’t say exactly why, considering the colored people he had run into during the last twenty years. During, before and after the War he had seen Negroes so stunned, or hungry, or tired, or bereft it was a wonder they recalled or said anything. Who, like him, had hidden in caves and fought owls for food; stole from pigs; who, like him, slept in trees in the day and walked by night; who, like him, had buried themselves in slop and jumped in wells to avoid regulators, raiders, patrollers, veterans, hill men, posses and merrymakers. Once he met a Negro about fourteen years old who lived by himself in the woods and said he couldn’t remember living anywhere else. He saw a witless colored woman jailed and hanged for stealing ducks she believed were her own babies.

            “Move. Walk. Run. Hide. Steal and move on. Only once had it been possible for him to stay in one spot—with a woman, or a family—for longer than a few months. That once was almost two years with a weaver lady in Delaware, the meanest place for Negroes he had ever seen outside Pulaski County, Kentucky, and of course the prison camp in Georgia.

            “From all those Negroes, Beloved was different. Her shining, her new shoes. It bothered him. Maybe it was just the fact that he didn’t bother her. Or it could be timing. She had appeared and been taken in on the very day Sethe and he had patched up their quarrel, gone out in public and had a right good time—like a family. Denver had come around, so to speak; Sethe was laughing; he had a promise of steady work, 124 was cleared from spirits. It had begun to look like a life. And damn! a water-drinking woman fell sick, got took in, healed, and hadn’t moved a peg since.

            “He wanted her out, but Sethe had let her in and he couldn’t put her out of a house that wasn’t his. It was one thing to beat up a ghost, quite another to throw a helpless colored girl out in territory infected by the Klan. Desperately thirsty for black blood, without which it could not live, the dragon swam the Ohio at will.”

Pg. 66

“I did it. I got us all out. Without Halle too. Up till then it was the only thing I ever did on my own. Decided. And it came off right, like it was supposed to. We was here. Each and every one of my babies and me too. I birthed them and I got em out and it wasn’t no accident. I did that. I had help, of course, lots of that, but still it was me doing it; me saying, Go on, and Now. Me having to look out. Me using my own head. But it was more than that. It was a kind of selfishness I never knew nothing about before. It felt good. Good and right. I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide. Look like I loved em more after I got here. Or maybe I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love. But when I got here, when I jumped down off that wagon—there wasn’t nobody in the world I couldn’t love if I wanted to. You know what I mean?”

“Paul D did not answer because she didn’t expect or want him to, but he did know what she meant. Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place, mist, doves, sunlight, copper, dirt, moon—everything belonged to the men who had the guns. Little men, some of them, big men too, each one of whom he could snap like a twig if wanted to. Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them. And these “men” who made even vixen laugh could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; layed down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn’t do. A woman, a child, a brother—a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant; to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.”

Pg. 163

“When the women assembled outside 124, Sethe was breaking a lump of ice into chunks. She dropped the ice pick into her apron pocket to scoop the pieces into a basin of water. When the music entered the window she was wringing a cool cloth to put on Beloved’s forehead. Beloved, sweating profusely, was sprawled on the bed in the keeping room, a salt rock in her hand. Both women heard it at the same time and both lifted their heads. As the voices grew louder, Beloved sat up, licking the salt and went into the bigger room. Sethe and she exchanged glances and started toward the window. They saw Denver sitting on the steps and beyond her, where the yard met the road, they saw the rapt faces of thirty neighborhood women. Some had their eyes closed; others looked at the hot, cloudless sky. Sethe opened the door and reached for Beloved’s hand. Together they stood in the doorway. For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash.

“The singing women recognized Sethe at once and surprised themselves by their absence of fear when they saw what stood next to her. The devil-child was clever, they thought. And beautiful. It had taken the shape of a pregnant woman, naked and smiling in the heat of the afternoon sun. Thunderblack and glistening, she stood on long straight legs, her belly big and tight. Vines of hair twisted all over her head. Jesus. Her smile was dazzling.

“Sethe feels her eyes burn and it may have been to keep them clear that she looks up. The sky is blue and clear. Not one touch of death in the definite green of the leaves. It is when she lowers her eyes to look again at the loving faces before her that she sees him. Guiding the mare, slowing down, his black hat wide-brimmed enough to hide his face but not his purpose. He is coming into her yard and he is coming for her best thing. She hears wings. Little hummingbirds stick needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thinks anything, it is no. No, no. Nonono. She flies. The ice pick is not in her hand, it is her hand.

“Standing alone on the porch, Beloved is smiling. But now her hand is empty. Sethe is running from her, running, and she feels the emptiness in the hand Sethe has been holding. Now she is running into the faces of the people out there, joining them and leaving Beloved behind. Alone. Again. Then Denver, running too. Away from here to the pile of people out there. They make a hill. A hill of black people, falling. And above them all, rising from his place with a whip in his hand, the man without skin, looking. He is looking at her.

Pg. 261-262

The Spirit of Phyllis Hall

Rich and Forever Giving

When my mom died last fall, she was ready to go, though she nevertheless regretted that she had reached the point where death might be welcome. She didn’t want to linger in her dying, nor did she laze about much in life. Loving always, but not particularly interested in showing it. She had friends, people who loved her, but she still lived her life in a kind of isolated splendor. She wasn’t much for passing out compliments, either, though she celebrated each of us for the virtues she believed we possessed. But she loved us. Gift aplenty.

Now Perry Hall’s mom has died. It has taken me a day or two of thinking about it to fully grasp what Phyllis Hall gave me that no one else did. And in understanding what she did for me, I know I feel a portion of the loss that the Hall family must feel.

Perry’s been a friend my whole adult life. We don’t see each other much anymore, but if I needed him and I told him so, he would come. As I believe I would come for him. A friendship with a man like Perry would be gift enough from Phyllis Hall, but it’s only a fraction of what Phyllis gave me.

In 1970 I spent a good portion of the summer living at Perry’s mom’s house on Hobart, a street one block from Trumbull Street in Detroit. Perry lived there, too, of course. A whole lot of others, brothers, sisters, grandchildren and cousins, lived there, too. And if they didn’t live there, they were around daytime, or nighttime, or mealtime, or bedtime, or maybe all the time; there was no roster or schedule.

During the day Perry and I worked at Ed Bowyer’s Insight Magazine. The magazine was an exemplary editorial vision, but Ed didn’t have the resources to execute that vision. The first issue, showing the statue, Spirit of Detroit, tying off an arm and shooting up, created quite a stir. Insight lasted, two, maybe, three, issues. But it was beyond doubt an important place to work and Detroit was a fine place to engage in struggle.

We ran one feature, an interview of a group of black Detroit-area Vietnam vets, over a couple of issues. The interview was raw, poignant, portentous; full of the anger and frustration of African American men in America in the ‘60s and’70s.

At night Perry and I would return to the Hall homestead, share food and drink, socialize, visit neighbors; a group of autoworkers, members of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) lived across the street, sharing space with grassroots activists who worked for radical Detroit city councilman Ken Cockrell. Life that summer felt relevant and rich. But the key to it all was Phyllis Hall.

She worked a swing shift as a matron at the Detroit House of Corrections, in my mind’s eye a large, dark, forbidding place. But I knew it was a place Phyllis could handle, even as I was sure that I would barely survive there.

Sometimes on her way home from work, Phyllis shopped for groceries and cooked at midnight. Whoever was awake would gather at the table. Others would rouse themselves from sleep. There were never enough beds, so on occasion, waking for midnight dinner, I would find one or two of Perry’s nieces or nephews sleeping on top of me. That always felt like a kind of loving comfort that I did not experience again until my own infant children slept soundly (and with a profound weight) on my chest.

It didn't matter how many people were at the house during those late night dinners, who was sleeping or who was awake, because there was always enough food. Maybe because there was always plenty of love.

I never figured out when Phyllis slept. I’d guess that since she was so busy taking care of everyone else she probably wasn’t getting enough sleep herself. But she lived through Hobart Street and so much else in her life, and lived well for eight decades, so maybe it was caring for others that kept her whole and thriving.

I didn’t see Phyllis much after that summer, but I knew I’d get a warm welcome anytime I came by. I never told her how loved she made me feel, I don’t think she needed to hear such things. But now that she’s gone, I feel the need to note some of the gifts I received from her, gifts I’ve been unwrapping my whole life.

Some time in high school, I lost my innocence about race. By college I knew that equality and meaningful integration and shared understanding were, without struggle and pain, beyond our collective reach in the United States. And I knew that whiteness was both a privilege and a sort of stupidity about the world. And I thought these things with a kind of sorrow I couldn’t evade despite varied and creative efforts to do so; especially after Martin Luther King, Jr., the most enduring heroic figure in my life, was killed. But Phyllis’s house was the place where my whiteness mattered least, and where I did not have to evade the sorrow because I could briefly set it aside. All that counted, so far as I could tell, was the content of my character and that every other person coming into Phylli’s home.

In Phyllis’s house, we were all affirmed.

And, thinking of those late night meals, I am aware that what we all dined on together may not have what we wanted, but it was all that we needed.

Phyllis Hall was the exemplar of the kind of person Sweet Baby James advises us to be:

“Shower the people you love with love,
show them the way that you feel.”

I'm happy to have known her.