The Economist - USA (2020-08-22)

TheEconomistAugust 22nd 2020 67

1

T

he originalsins of American race re-
lations are as stark as they were horrif-
ic. For over two centuries, black people
were enslaved. For decades afterwards they
endured legal and de facto segregation,
and, in the South—where Albert Murray
grew up—forced labour and peonage im-
posed through convict-leasing and share-
cropping. These brute facts bequeathed
pain and injustice. But they also left a com-

plex cultural legacy. Murray probed that

complexity as deeply, seriously and joy-

ously as any American writer.

He was a poet and novelist and—most

lastingly—an essayist and critic. He wrote

elegantly about art, music, literature, travel

and people. He was, in Isaiah Berlin’s tax-

onomy, one hundred percent fox, viewing

the world through many lenses (as op-

posed to the single perspective of the

hedgehog). His life was an American hero’s

journey—and his work is as urgent now as

when it was first published.

Born in 1916 to an unmarried 16-year-old

in Nokomis, Alabama, Murray was brought

up by adoptive parents near Mobile, among

survivors of the Clotilda, the last ship to

bring enslaved Africans to America. He

came to know—or at least know of—Cudjo

Lewis, a Clotilda survivor whom Murray

turned into Unka Jo Jo in his first novel,

“Train Whistle Guitar” (published in 1974).

He died 97 years later in Harlem, having

helped create the jazz programme at New

York’s Lincoln Centre, been elected to the

American Academy of Arts and Letters (and

of Arts and Sciences), and lived a life of the

mind that should make today’s writers

weep into their Twitter feeds.

Don’t miss the comedians at the Apollo

At the heart of his work was a belief in the

heroism of artistic struggle and expres-

sion—not as a route to fame, riches or in-

fluence, nor to express political views, but

as a means to make sense of the world and

an individual’s place in it. As he wrote in

“Stomping the Blues” (1976), an extended

explication of jazz and blues, America’s

greatest native art forms, artists confront

“the complexities inherent in the human

situation”. For Murray, “human existence is

almost always a matter of endeavour and

hence also a matter of heroic action.”

At the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama he

met Ralph Ellison, who, Murray noticed,

had taken out many of the same books that

he had. They were intellectual comrades

for much of their lives, both preoccupied

with the range of the American experience

and the central role of black people in it. As

Ellison put it, “Whatever else the true

American is, he is also somehow black.”

But they took inverse paths as writers. Elli-

son published just one novel in his life-

time, “Invisible Man”, one of America’s

greatest, in 1952.

By contrast, Murray did not publish his

first book, “The Omni-Americans”, until

1970, after a career in the air force that had

begun during the second world war. His

last, a series of interviews with Papa Jo

Jones, a mercurial drummer, came out

when he was 95. Both he and Ellison

viewed improvisational jazz and blues mu-

sicians, able to conduct conversations

without words, as the supreme artists. He

The American story

Twentieth-century fox

WASHINGTON, DC
Albert Murray was one of the finest bards of America’s racial complexity

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