Free Makeda by Randall Robinson Page B

you to take with me. Come, stand here.”
    I posed her against the long wall with the Akân wall hanging showing over her right shoulder. I picked up the Kodak Brownie Hawkeye that my parents had given me for my tenth birthday. She stood still until the small clap of the camera’s shutter released her.
    “Let me get one more, Grandma.”
    “Here. Take this with you.” She held out the little book that the Akân man at the market had given her years before. Placing it in my hands, she said, “Don’t forget to take with you the Dogon notes.”
    “I won’t forget, Grandma. I won’t forget.”
    “Guard them, Gray.”
    “I will,” I said and hugged her one final time.

C HAPTER T EN
    I t was at college that I was first introduced to a notion that one of my more thoughtful professors called “the intellectual ideal.”
    As Negro students, we did not know how the politics of the country’s white society functioned internally, how its edicts were formulated and lowered down for our consumption and compliance. It had never before occurred to me that we might try and puzzle out its functions with an eye toward influencing them. White America was opaque, indecipherable, and entirely separate from our America. We were bottled up and over by its stolid mass camped on our borders. If the circumstances of our poverty seemed to me irrefragable, so did their power. It had seemed best not to think about it, which was what the freshmen class did, en masse . We were powerless, a conclusion most of us reached without deliberation.
    Early in my second year, I began doing extra reading in an effort to understand the various and confusing political chemistries of Washington. This business of left and right was a new and disturbing discovery that was starkly antithetical to how I had been taught for the short nineteen years of my life to view the world. The Negroes I knew measured the arrangements and equities of society in vertical terms: right over wrong; justice over injustice; freedom over oppression; fairness over unfairness; comfort over pain. For Negroes, life and politics were not board games that could be played laterally—for the sheer fun of playing them, or for simple ambition’s sake, without risk of mortal consequence. As I read on, it increasingly seemed to me that white people played their game—the left-right sport—with other people’s lives and other people’s fundamental rights. Thus, with an air of noblesse oblige , they could ply their rulership craft in a mannerly fashion, without risk or emotion or fear of personal injury. Yet our game was not a game at all, but rather a social struggle that was very much up-down, vertical, dangerous, and gravely unfunny.
    By the age of nineteen, college had already changed me dramatically. There was a new me, and every night before falling asleep, I thanked not the college but my grandmother for getting me there.
    Dr. Benjamin Quarles, the professor from whom I first heard the term “intellectual ideal,” was already an old man when I met him, his seminal study on the life and times of Frederick Douglass long behind him. But preeminent historian though he indisputably may have been, his was anything but a household name in the country’s black community. Yet he remained easily the most brilliant teacher I’d ever had. Indeed, he was recognized by his peers, black and white alike, as one of America’s most important historians. I’d never once seen him, however, on television, or read mention of him in any magazine or newspaper, not even in Jet . With a minimum of noise, he taught his classes at Morgan and wrote his splendid books that, I thought, scarcely disturbed the cultivated inattention of what ought to have been his natural audience. I ascribed this troubling condition to Dr. Quarles’s apparent disinterest in public notice. But Dr. Abana, a visiting professor from the University of Ghana, thought otherwise. Although he didn’t mention Dr. Quarles directly in