Photograph by Whitney Curtis
June 13, 2009, 11:04 p.m.:
Dear Ms. Cooperman:
My wife would like to know why your magazine wishes to run an article about me.
gerald early
June 15, 2009, 8:58 a.m.:
Dear Dr. Early:
You could just hand her your c.v.?
Jeannette
June 15, 2009, 1:50 p.m.:
Wives have a tendency not to be very impressed with their husbands. But to be honest I was curious myself.
Gerald Early holds what’s perhaps Washington University’s plummiest professorship, the Merle S. Kling chair that was warmed by its most famous novelist, Stanley Elkin. Early’s a favorite commentator for National Public Radio, filmmaker Ken Burns, and The New York Times. He’s won the Whiting Writers’ Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Distinguished Service to the Humanities, and a slew of others (that CV runs 12 pages). But he’s best loved for his ability to see through scholarly gobbledygook, ideological agendas, fancy titles, even awards.
“Consider the literary award, which I know well,” he wrote for The New York Times on March 6, 2006. “You win because the jury couldn’t agree on anything else…or a friend bullied it through, or yours came up when it was the year to give it to a minority…or you’re pretty old and never won, or you’re so young that winning makes you seem like a wunderkind… Anyone who gets a puffed-up ego because of it is absolutely insane or believes in fantasy more than he or she should.”
Most of us do. What keeps Early’s ego in check?
“His wife has a lot to do with it,” guesses colleague Jim Wertsch, director of Wash. U.’s McDonnell International Scholars Academy. “Ida has the capacity to give anybody a look and say, ‘Don’t give me that crap.’”
Being black helps, too: Early’s always been an outsider, for years one of only two tenured African-American professors at Wash. U.
Being smart helps: Wayne Fields, professor of English and American culture studies, says Early prepares thoroughly for everything and is “a rarity among academics, in that he is completely secure in himself in these situations.”
And then there are his two daughters, Linnet and Rosalind. Professor Rafia Zafar, whom Early brought in to take the reins of the African & African-American Studies Program, remembers Linnet giggling, “Well, you know, it’s because of us that he’s famous.”
All true, in part. But the foundation was laid in south Philly.
“My mom put a lot of constraints on herself, and I did the same thing. In fact, I don’t think I understand life without seeing it as a perfect labyrinth of constraints that have to be negotiated.”
Born April 21, 1952, Early grew up on the south side of Philadelphia, surrounded by street fighters, gang members, and the macho sons of Sicilian immigrants.
He aspired to be Sidney Poitier.
Surprisingly, the Fifth and South street gangs tolerated this smart, quiet kid, even showed him a certain warmth. Maybe it was because he never acted superior (“I always thought people had something to offer me”). More likely, it was because he learned to love boxing.
“I wanted to have certain masculine credentials,” he says. “It didn’t do to be too bookish a kid.” He boxed a few times but found he had no skill at it. “What I did discover was that I was good at taking a beating,” he says ruefully. “That meant something to the people around me.”
He had to win his street cred on his own; his dad had died of a brain aneurysm when Gerald was 9 months old. His mother, Florence Oglesby, rarely talked about the husband she’d lost. It was her mother who told Gerald that his dad’s nickname had been Duke (maybe for Ellington?) and that he’d worked as a mechanic and a baker, but what he’d yearned to do was write.
When Gerald was 12, his mother gave him a box of his father’s books. He pulled them out one by one…classics, autobiographies, world histories…and turned the pages hesitantly—until the words took over, and he devoured them.
There were other men in his life, of course: his West Indian grandfather, who took him to baseball games. His cousin, who was killed in a gang shooting. Mr. King, his sixth-grade teacher, who expected great things.
But the real force was the women. His sisters, both older, let him tag along to the library, read Dylan and Dostoevsky to him, played him Miles Davis and Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, and eventually introduced him to friends who were writers, artists, leaders of the Black Panthers.
His mother worked as a crossing guard so she’d be there when her kids got home from school. “I don’t want you out there runnin’ in the streets,” she warned Gerald.
“I didn’t even think of what he was going to be,” she says now. “I just wanted to make sure he got through high school and used his brains.”
Oglesby’s life was one moral imperative after another. She worked extra hard to make her kids mannerly, because they were living in a white neighborhood. “To get as far as you can, you will always have to know more or do more than a white child,” she told them. Then she sharpened the sword’s other edge: “When you go out into this world, you make sure that you are proud.”
“All the academic training I’ve had, sometimes it gives you lots of B.S. to talk around something. Ida had enormous ability to get to the heart of things. She’s never been afraid of what she likes and doesn’t like. She’s never been afraid of who she is.”
Gerald graduated high school absurdly early and went off to Antioch College at 16. Homesick, he lasted six weeks. He went out to San Francisco, lived with his sister, and worked a steamy, sweaty job in the Presidio’s commissary, wistfully thinking about how college boys wore ties and got to read books all the time.
Deciding he “just wasn’t very good at work,” he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a bachelor’s in English, then did the expected and started law school. He left a year later, bored to distraction.
“When I met him, he was floundering again,” says Ida Early (then Haynes). “He had a job interviewing people who’d just been arrested, and he subbed as a preschool teacher.”
She says they fell in love at the same time; he says he fell first.
“She was nice, generous, strong in a lot of the things I’m not particularly good at,” he says. “She was very orderly. She knew a lot about etiquette, getting along with people. I didn’t even know how to dress when I met Ida. I had a working-class chip on my shoulder, and she got rid of that. She’d say, ‘You are hurting yourself when you act that way. You are not acting like a grown-up person.’”
Ida had a mind as fine as his, but it decoded people rather than ideas. (She’s now secretary to the board at Wash. U.) After they married, Gerald wanted them to go together to Cornell University and get their doctorates, combining their fellowship money.
“It was just not my thing,” Ida says. “I quickly got pregnant. After our first child was born, I worked full time on campus. And after the second, I said, ‘You know, honey, I think it’s time for you to go get a job!’”
One of the friends they made at Cornell, Ken McClane, who’s now W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Literature there, remembers how delighted and easygoing the Earlys were when Ida got pregnant. “Most parents are so worried about the child breaking. Gerald and Ida understood how resilient children are. They were the first parents I’d met who didn’t strike me as being dangerously insecure.”
Early smiles when he hears the comment. “I wouldn’t say I had any special love for kids, but I liked them,” he says. “I found them easy to be around. I thought they were funny. And I was really ready to be a father—I had worked out some ideas about it. Because I hadn’t known my father, I wasn’t hemmed in by a good father or a bad one. A lot of my ideas I got from television. The Rifleman, he was just who you’d like to have as your father.”
“He’s one of our premier scholars. We’re famous at Wash. U. because Gerald is famous.” —Jim Wertsch
No sooner had Early bent his head to receive his doctoral hood than the call came from Wash. U. He joined the faculty in 1982 and has been there ever since, to the shock of just about every intellectual on the East Coast.
“Yeah, it surprises me sometimes, too,” he admits. “But the school has been very good to me, and I think I’ve been very good for the school.”
Ivy League schools have offered Early the sun and the moon on a silver platter. But Wash. U. has managed to hold him, and in turn, he’s helped shape the institution.
He gave muscle and sinew to African and African-American studies; exploded the elitist boundaries around cultural studies; created courses that filled in the first hour, despite their rigor. And he opened up possibilities for his younger colleagues by scaling the ivory tower in an entirely new way, using essays and films that reached far beyond the academy.
Two years ago, Washington University hung Early’s portrait on the main floor of the library. On the canvas, he’s slumped on a stool in a blue shirt and khakis, hands loosely linked in his lap, reams of paper curled in a productive mess behind him. There’s a bookshelf crammed with leatherbound classics and, among them, one of his books. He looks serious, his eyes searching.
His mother flew in for the ceremonial installation. She flew back again a year later, just so she could walk in and see her son’s portrait hanging there, normal as the curtains.
“Gerald’s very shy, which I suspect people who read his work may miss. He’s also kind of opaque—you can be talking to him and look away and look back and he’s disappeared. There’s something about his world that sometimes you just can’t enter.” —Wayne Fields
Early starts the interview formally polite, the eyes behind his gold-rimmed specs a little remote, all of his energy turned inward. He’s kind but distant, like a dad trying to read his newspaper during a slumber party. Then we start talking about baseball. Boxing. Jazz. Motown. To Kill a Mockingbird and whether it’s “a lot of sentimental flapdoodle,” as he once wrote, or filled with a heartfelt and necessary empathy, as he’s also argued. Slowly, steadily, he heats up, and soon the ideas are spilling over, his voice is loud, he’s funny and engaged and eloquent. This is how he is in the classroom, or with friends; he can get as revved up, they say, as a preacher.
There’s also something about the way he ministers to people, his colleagues say; he never puts someone down for not knowing something, and he always assumes anyone could do what he does.
“He steadies and calms the whole institution, in odd ways that are almost impossible to evaluate,” remarks Fields, a good friend who shared an office with Early when they were both junior profs. “He provides a kind of conscience. There is a kind of pastoral function, but it’s complicated: Gerald is both prophet and pastor, and that’s an unlikely combination. Pastors comfort, and prophets make you uncomfortable.
“Gerald never seeks to dominate,” Fields continues. “But he is profoundly honest and truthful, and because there is deep insight, he is prophetic. He takes us places we wouldn’t go without him.”
His reserve is either endearing or off-putting, depending on how someone interprets it. “I feel it is hard for him to take the first step to know people,” says Jian Leng, associate director of the Center for the Humanities, which Early directs. “He doesn’t know how to flatter. If he can say nothing, he prefers to do that. He’s like a little child, he needs time. He doesn’t trust people easily.”
“The things about him that are a little flinty or off-putting are things I admire and kind of envy,” says Chris King. “He has that ability to look you in the eye and tell you what he thinks should happen next, even when he knows you’re not going to be crazy about it. And he’ll tell you no. You have to tell people no if your yeses are going to be meaningful.”
Now editor of the St. Louis American, King is a white guy Early once hired to teach African-American studies, saying, when King hesitated, “I’m a black man and I taught John Keats—was I unqualified? You have the intellectual wherewithal to do it.” King repeats the phrase slowly, savoring it: “Intellectual wherewithal. That’s what he has.”
“I think there are only three things America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music, and baseball.” —Early, in Ken Burns’ Baseball
“The first thing that commended Gerald to me was his writing—and, therefore, his mind,” says documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. “His understanding of the intersection of sports and race in American literature and history—which is amazingly complicated—he just got it.” Burns first used Early as a consultant for his documentary Baseball and then put him on camera.
“The statement he gave us [above] was one of the animating principles of my life,” Burns says. “He was nailing in that moment what the genius of America was, without saying it was improvisation. [The Constitution,] four pieces of paper that are able to adjudicate our most complicated conflicts. Baseball, a child’s stick-and-ball game, but with infinite chesslike combinations. Jazz, where I play not the notes on the page but what I feel, in concert with others. When Gerald made that statement, I’d just finished The Civil War, and I realized I was working on a trilogy. So after Baseball, I had to do Jazz. In one simple sentence, he basically gave me my life’s work.”
“Maybe your survival depends on your race consciousness.”
“My survival doesn’t depend on any such damn thing,” Ida snapped back. “But there are a lot of herd-instinct, cowardly, crab-in-a-basket Negroes and some do-good liberal whites who want you to think that.” —excerpted from Early’s essay in These Hands I Know: African-American Writers on Family
In 1991, he’d taken Ida and the girls to a Junior League of St. Louis Christmas bazaar at Le Chateau. (Ida was the league’s first black president.) Bored, he wandered away, shopped a bit, then returned to wait for them. A police officer approached and told him he “fit the description of someone reported ‘lurking’ at Le Chateau.”
“Something in me snapped,” Early wrote later. He threw his wallet at the cop, told him there was tons of ID inside and he could take his pick. He went home fuming, but he wasn’t going to talk about it publicly—until Ida called him sobbing. She’d gone to complain to the chief of the Frontenac police and, finding him more defensive than apologetic, left in a rage.
Early sat down, taped Arlo Guthrie’s guitar inscription (“This machine kills fascists”) to his computer, and started writing. He also talked to reporters. “We came across as these very dignified black people,” he chuckles. “I called it my Sidney Poitier moment.”
Later, he mentions how scared he used to be, as a young man navigating south Philly. “The biggest fear I had was, I’m either gonna be killed by some black guys in a gang who think I’m in a gang, or by some white policeman who thinks I’m a criminal.” He was mugged twice and stopped once, after spending hours reading in the library. The cop said he matched the description of a guy who’d just robbed a dry-cleaning store and shot the owner. The owner’s wife was there, sobbing, and they brought Early up to see if she’d ID him.
“My life flashed before my eyes,” he says. “I just kept saying to myself, ‘This is not good. This is not a good situation. If she says it was me—and she’s so upset, how could she even look clearly?—how can I prove it wasn’t?’ It made me understand that I was vulnerable.”
So maybe Frontenac brought it all back?
“Yeah. I thought that I had finally gotten to the point where I was beyond something like that happening.”
“Both he and Obama write about things I’d hesitate to tell myself, let alone somebody else. Yet it doesn’t for a moment impair the dignity of what they’re doing, or the gravity of their words.” —Jim Wertsch
Early goes out of his way, after accolades, to shoot himself back down to earth. After I repeat his mother’s praises, for example, I ask him to name the worst thing he ever did as a kid.
“Stealing,” he says instantly. “That was the worst thing I ever did. I went through a phase of stealing stuff from about 12 to about 17.” First, he embezzled around $1 a week from a merchant who was paying him a pittance. “Then, when I got to be a teenager, I so wanted to own books. I stole Sex and Racism in America by Calvin C. Hernton and Another Country by James Baldwin, slipped them in my backpack.” Somehow the bookstore owner found out, because when Early returned for another heist, he felt himself flying backwards through the doorway and heard the owner yelling, “You dirty little thief!”
Shoved down to the sidewalk, Early read the expression in the eyes of the people stepping around and over him. “But even that didn’t stop me,” he says. “I had another job where I started taking things, again because I didn’t feel I was being paid enough. And then I had this kind of epiphany that I couldn’t do that anymore, it was a terrible thing to do, people couldn’t trust you.”
The epiphany wasn’t exactly Paul on the road to Damascus; Early’s first mentor, Mr. King, had a hand in it. Early had continued to visit his sixth-grade teacher, and one day he broached “a friend’s” iniquity. “I was half-confessing, and I wasn’t doing such a good job of it,” Early says. “He started telling me how you had to be who you are claiming to be. I was so suddenly and completely ashamed, I just ran away. I never stole again. It hurts even talking about it now.”
He hadn’t needed to; was this compulsive honesty or self-sabotage? I remember that, in 1995, Early confessed adultery in Harper’s. Not for the shock value (“In this era of the tabloid, I find confession to be cheaply wrought and trite”), but because he’d just written the acclaimed Daughters: On Family and Fatherhood, in which he appeared as the loving husband and father. “By portraying myself as a black Ward Cleaver, I made myself into something far more wonderful than I actually was,” he wrote. “So to confess a brief bout of clumsy, obsessive adultery, as destructive as it was puerile…stands as something of a counternarrative ego to my Daughters persona, a kind of thumbing of my nose at the rewards for all my good works.”
Noble—but how did Ida take that confessional essay?
“She took it fine. A lot of wives wouldn’t have permitted broaching that kind of subject, but she’s always understood me as a writer.”
“Mmm. Did she say anything when she read it?”
“Yeah. ‘Don’t do it again.’”
“I wish, not unreasonably, in the matter of being read, to be no more burdened by race than any white writer is. This is not special pleading but simply a call for common respect.” —from Early’s introduction to his poetry collection, How the War in the Streets Is Won
Everybody’s got a to-do list for Gerald Early. “I wish he wrote more,” says Daniel Halpern, founder of Ecco Press and the man who first urged him to collect his essays into the award-winning Tuxedo Junction and Culture of Bruising, books that launched Early’s career.
“I do wonder, where is that next great complete thought, as opposed to another collection of essays,” says Chris King.
“The thing I would love to see him do next is mold some kind of public intellectual forum that would push us forward,” says Wertsch. “Tell us why Obama is happening to us. This celebration of diversity is recasting ‘American’ in the globe, in what was supposed to be the post-American century. And Gerald can explain it in a way that is accessible to a broad audience.”
He plays that role so often pretended to, so seldom actualized: that of the “public intellectual.”
“I’ve always felt uneasy with that phrase,” Early blurts. “Public intellectuals are people who have great expertise to talk about a particular subject but suffer from too much ego and therefore talk about subjects they shouldn’t talk about.”
He, on the other hand, is careful to stick with what he knows—even when it means satisfying his editors’ hunger for his insights about race, a topic he doesn’t find as endlessly fascinating as they seem to think he should.
Yet the way Early talks about race angers radical black students, bleeding-heart liberals, and just about anybody who sees complexity as weakness. “People get annoyed that he’s not just one-track, not an automatic ally,” says Wertsch.
When Early won tenure, the only other tenured black at Wash. U. was Larry Davis, now dean of the School of Social Work and director of the Center on Race and Social Problems at the University of Pittsburgh. They became friends—although Davis was always impatient with Early’s mildness.
“The university was so standoffish that it made his role standoffish,” says Davis, who wanted Early to speak out more, give talks in the community, move to a university more concerned with diversity. “He’s tried so hard to get more blacks on the faculty. Hell, Wash. U. has no excuse; it’s one of the wealthiest universities in the country. But they have rewarded him and not his mission. At the end of the day, he gets a raise, and no one else is hired.
“Wash. U.’s a comfortable place,” Davis adds. “It’s a big pond, and he’s the only black swan, or duck, or whatever he wants to be. But I think he’d have been more beneficial to black America had he been someplace else.”
Early admits to frustration over the years but says it’s inevitable—and by no means unique to Wash. U. Nor does he want race to be his only filter, his animating passion.
“It’s possible for any black person in my position to become totally preoccupied with defending the race—ducking even when no one is throwing punches at you, as Ralph Ellison once put it,” he observes, “and I have tried very hard to avoid that. I take my subjects seriously and respect my readers too much not to be honest with them.”
He exercises the same restraint with politics. Early took H.L. Mencken’s skepticism as a model, deciding an essayist owed it to his reader to search for truth, not reinforce ideology. “The most important thing, I felt, was to be independent, not associated with any particular camp. As a result of being too liberal for conservatives and vice versa, no one could predict what I was going to say, and readers never had to feel there was some ideological position I was bound to defend.”
“I told him, ‘You should definitely skip the part where you made us wear Afros through third and fourth grade.’ It was awful. They called us the Fungus Sisters!” —Linnet Husi, referring to her dad’s book about his daughters
He’s not handy, not one bit, Ida says. Nor is he hedonistic; she has to think a long time to come up with comfort foods. “Fruit,” she says flatly. “Red Zinger herbal tea. Paul Newman pretzels. Oh, and dark chocolate—but he’s still got some from Christmas. I would eat the whole gob of it; he’ll say, ‘I’ve had enough. I just wanted a taste.’”
His family’s biggest complaint is the mess. “Papers all over the dining room,” groans Linnet Husi, “and we had to clear the table for dinner.” For Ida, it’s “the piles. Everywhere. Books, music, newspapers, journals. I tried bookcases, then those filled up; tried basement shelves, they filled up. But he gets excited when he sees a lot of books.”
He stays up late working, works on weekends. He once pinned a quote to his office door: “If thine eye be single, thy body shall be full of light” (Matthew 6:22). Zafar says, “He’s so focused that he can get stuck in an airport—the rest of us will be grinding our molars flat, and Gerald will just whip out a notebook and start writing.”
He can be oblivious, Ida agrees. “One day he came in and said, ‘You know, we have a really nice living room. You have done a great job.’ That was last year. We’d lived there 16 years.”
He can be goofy, but only within his family: “It’s a private goofy,” Ida says. “He dances—and dancing is not his thing.” Linnet just had a baby, and when Early heard his first grandson was a boy, he vowed to buy him a tiny leather jacket and sunglasses. (Grandpa may be an expert in 19th-century literature, but his favorite movie’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day.)
Linnet loved that her dad was there every day when they got home from school (just as his own mom had been). “He’d make sure we did our homework and didn’t eat too many cookies. He was a really hands-on parent.” Her favorite memory’s the baseball games: “He’d always buy me junk food—a hot dog, maybe, or a pretzel. I was thrilled. I would want to do the wave and everything, but my dad would just sit there, really quiet. Wouldn’t cheer, wouldn’t boo. At times, he seemed almost stressed, he was so focused on the game.”
He was serious about black identity, too. “Yeah, race fatigue,” she sighs. “By the time I was in sixth or seventh grade, I was going to predominantly white schools, so I had predominantly white friends, and they’d come over, and when they would leave, my dad would always say, ‘Those are nice girls, but do you have any black friends?’ This was middle school—you are doing good just to make friends! And he was like, ‘Those friends aren’t good enough. You need black friends.’ I’d tell him, ‘Oh, Daddy, you need to get with it.’ After a while, it almost became noise; didn’t faze me one way or another.” By the time she married (Stan Husi, a white guy who was German and Swiss and didn’t speak English too fluently), her father had relaxed.
“I think maybe it had a lot to do with his mother and how he grew up,” she speculates. “I remember as a kid looking through this box of photographs: my parents doing these black-power fists and wearing these big Afros. My mom used to eat at Nation of Islam restaurants! I was always surprised at how race-conscious they seemed to be.”
“I never wanted to be one of those intellectuals who hung around kitsch because it was hip, easy to write about." —Early in One Nation Under a Groove: Motown and American Culture
The only real controversy in Early’s career came in 2001, when he took over as director of the university’s International Writers Center, founded by literary lion William H. Gass. Once focused on high lit, it now spans everything from children’s studies to jazz to comic books. Gass and those loyal to his vision won’t even dignify the change with a comment.
“I can understand it,” Early says quietly. “He had built up something, and the transition didn’t—well, it wasn’t the best. What he’d built changed in a way that seemed like it was a rebuke.” He sighs. “It was a perfect storm: The administration wanted something different, I wanted something different. Partly you want something different because of your own ego, partly because you have a sense of your colleagues and you want to make something that’s going to fit where they are.” He says he wishes he could do that transition over again, somehow do it better. Then he throws up his hands: “You know, you just have to walk away from it, and whatever happens to it happens.”
He’s not blowing smoke; people who’ve worked under him say he grants amazing latitude, keenly aware that someone who takes on a project needs to be able to shape it. As he’s shaped the center, which he renamed The Center for the Humanities in 2003. It aims to integrate high and low culture, scholars and those outside the tower—just as Early’s own work does.
So does he still think it’s easy writing about kitsch (which, by his definition, includes pretty much all of popular culture)?
“It’s easy in some respects, because a lot of what it means is rather transparent,” he responds. “Popular culture succeeds on its accessibility; it is easier to be clever because your readers can instantly recognize that you are being clever. But I also think doing scholarship of some intellectual sort on some highly literary subject can be…not easy by any means, but a rote process of sorting out claims. Your thinking is stimulated by other people’s thinking. A lot of times, when writing about popular culture, there is either little thinking that has been done on the subject or none at all.”
When Early writes about pop, he writes about its context, pattern, symbol, and significance. He finds relevance in the way it connects to the marginalized, the underground, the unarticulated. He finds the universals: Sport is ritualized competition, jazz is deliberate freedom.
“He understands that the music you hear in your house is as central to the universe as reading Blake,” McClane says. “There’s nothing he does not take seriously. He never diminishes wonder.”
Nor does he rationalize it, McClane adds: “That’s one of the reasons he writes poetry. As best he can, he tries to honor, using Ralph Ellison’s term, ‘all the frequencies.’”
“Not knowing, on my birthday long ago, my mother gave me
Sealed with a dark, hot kiss, a white album, a tradition
Which now I open, on another birthday, for my daughters.”
—from “Five Études and a Jeremiad,” in How the War in the Streets Is Won
Perhaps the most vulnerable Early’s ever been was when his daughter Rosalind, then in her early twenties, was diagnosed with a cancer that could easily have been fatal.
“Ida was very, very strong about that,” he says carefully. “That was a difficult matter. Rosalind was very afraid. I think the biggest thing you have to do in that situation is make people get over their fear.” He stops there. But when the topic shifts from his experience to parents who have borne the loss of a child, his tone softens and the words tumble out: “I feel incredible pain for every parent I ever hear of who has a kid who dies. It makes me cry. I just know what that would feel like. It’s the biggest nightmare a parent has.”
Colleagues say Early was stoic through his daughter’s cancer treatment. His wife says, “He’s fearless. And he has a very tough shell.”
Maybe that’s why Einstein finally got to him.
Einstein was a rescued golden retriever. For years, Early had fought his daughters’ pleas for a dog. He didn’t want the stink and mess and work, and besides, he was allergic. Ida told him they’d just put their names on a waiting list, it would take forever… And then he came home from a trip, and his daughters informed him that Einstein was waiting for them to pick him up.
Early was still muttering his protests as he drove them to the shelter. And sure enough, he wound up walking the dog every evening. “He was a very cowardly dog, and it was endearing,” he admits. “If he met an alpha dog, he would hide behind me!” He throws his head back and laughs. “Oh man.” Then he discovered Einstein could do tricks—sort of. “He’d gotten this training, but he was not an A student, he was maybe a B-minus student. He would get the ball and sort of halfway bring it back. I really liked him because of all of this. Thunderstorms, he got in bed with us! And he was such a good-hearted dog.” When Einstein fell ill, Early told the vet, “Do everything, I don’t care what it costs.”
Einstein died anyway. Nine years later, Early still softens when he talks about him.
“That dog taught me a lot,” he says. “I owe that dog a lot. He was so patient, and there was something very tranquil about his presence. He was quite comfortable with his fears and insecurities.”
And Early? What fears does he have?
“Whatever fears I had, I don’t know if I could quite pinpoint them,” he says, as though that’s final. Then he switches tense. “The fears I do have… Yeah, I need to think about that a little more.” He pauses again.
“I guess the biggest thing is that, you know, you are afraid that whatever it is you are doing that seems to be worth something, there will come a day that you won’t be able to do it anymore,” he says, “and then life won’t be worth so much. Or you think it won’t.
“The next big fear”—he’s talking fast now—“is that the work that you have done is somehow exposed to be fraudulent and no good. Then that Ida would die and I’d be left alone. Or my children would die.” He looks up. “That’s always been a big fear, my children dying.”
And in the end, it’s his daughter Rosalind who sums him up best:
“I think my dad is a pretty simple guy. Like James Baldwin, he wants to be a good man and a good writer. And he loves baseball.”
Early Hits
- The first formal collection of Early’s work was Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture, and it won the 1988 Whiting Writers’ Award.
- Next came Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, winner of the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award.
- He was a semifinalist for another National Book Critics Circle Award in 1995 for Daughters: On Family and Fatherhood.
- Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation won a Gustavus Meyer Center human-rights award.
- He was chosen as the series editor for Bantam’s annual Best African American Fiction anthology.
