“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.
