Authors: Gil Scott-Heron
Soon, a lot of the time I was supposed to spend on biology or math I spent at the typewriter or in that back room where they kept the books too precious to check out. You had to read them there,
so that was where I was a lot of the time.
Every Wednesday evening the noted authority in Black American literature Professor J. Saunders Redding drove up to Lincoln from Washington, D.C., and delivered a three-hour seminar on the
subject. My first year there I audited his lectures. He did most of his lectures without opening a book; he was a walking repository of Black American literature. He had personally known a lot of
the people who connected me to where I came from creatively.
At some stage during my first year, I had the idea for a novel and wanted to write it. I thought I could find the proper rhythm and could balance my schedule between class work and work on the
story, but it proved difficult and I was getting nothing done on the novel. There’s a story I heard once about a jackass that was set down squarely between two bales of hay and starved to
death. I was just like Jack. When I opened a textbook I saw the characters from my book, and when I sat at the typewriter I saw my ass getting kicked out of school for failing all my subjects.
Still, in the fall of 1968 I was back on campus, having put up all the money I had earned over the summer plus a small grant from the school to follow up what had been a less than scintillating
freshman year. Six weeks into sophomore year, though, the same thing that had brought my first year crashing down around my ears began to threaten my second.
I asked the school for a leave of absence so I could devote myself to writing
The Vulture
. I would remain on campus for the rest of the semester since I had paid for room and board. I
would be at work on the novel and would receive incompletes for all my classes rather than a complete set of failing grades. That would make it easier to apply for readmission to Lincoln or
elsewhere.
My advisor was the head of the English department and a thoroughly decent and sympathetic man, but he had no intention of endorsing any plans I had for leaving school to write a book. He
respected what writing of mine he had read, but there had been nothing in any of it to suggest to him that I was the next great Black writer to come through Lincoln. And as he reminded me,
“the novel is a
most
difficult form.”
I knew how difficult it was. That wasn’t why I was writing a novel, to show how tough I was. I was simply tired of school. But when the truth wouldn’t work, my advisor was not above
or below getting rid of some pesky interrogator by assigning him a task somewhere else. The good doctor told me that if I was really serious about leaving Lincoln, the man to see was the dean.
The dean reacted to my proposal as though I had taken leave of my senses and asked me to get the school psychiatrist to approve the plan. The dean must have thought I was crazy. It certainly
seemed crazy that someone as poor as I was would bet his last money on a first novel.
When I told my mother, she said, “Well, I don’t think quitting school was the smartest thing you could have done, but go ahead and finish writing it and then come home and get your
job. Promise that you’ll go back and finish school. You’re going to need to go back and you’re going to need a degree, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I really felt good after our talk. She was always able to be both critical and encouraging. My mother had proved once again she loved me unconditionally. She had kept her faith in me. Again. I
wanted to make her proud of me, and I wanted to prove that she had taken the right tack.
She was not unaware of my flawed makeup as a person. Nor did she turn a blind eye or ear to the things I lacked as a writer or singer. But her criticism was always constructive, and offered in a
manner that let me down easy. When she read or heard a problem, she would say things like “what I might try instead . . .” or “rather than . . .” and avoid just saying
something didn’t work. That’s why I had always taken my ideas—my prose and poetry, my melodies and lyrics—to her, even before I felt ready to share them or even show them to
other family members. I just knew I would learn something from her comments; she gave me another way to look at what I was doing.
My mother actually provided the punch line for “Whitey on the Moon,” and also suggested mimicking Langston Hughes by repeating the opening line of the poem—“A rat done
bit my sister Nell”—after the bridge-like middle section.
When I called my Uncle B.B. to tell him I was taking time off to write, he jumped all over me. For a family that had sent an entire generation to college—my mother and all her siblings,
including B.B.—I was setting quite another precedent by being the first one of their line to “take a sabbatical.” I had to stand in the hallway at a payphone listening to him and
his opinions on a whole variety of choices I’d made up to that point in my life—the marijuana, the late hours, the guys I chose to hang out with. He saved his worst blows for the last;
he spent five or ten minutes that felt like an hour criticizing my style and talent. We were both almost out of breath when he finished.
I planned to finish my novel before the start of the second semester in February 1969. That showed how little I knew about what I was doing. By January, I had little more than I had when I saw
the university psychiatrist in October and gained his approval. But that month, January, brought me the idea for the ending of the book and a method of connecting the four separate narratives to
the book’s opening. Now all I needed was a chair and my typewriter.
That was damn near all I had. For the next two months I worked in a dry cleaners about a quarter mile from campus. With their business struggling, the owner and his wife both needed to work
elsewhere and wanted someone to mind their property and take in and hand out the dry cleaning during the day. A guy in a van stopped by around six each evening to pick up what I handed him in a
large laundry bag and return finished items previously collected. I slept in the back and took meal money from the small income generated by the students. A few friends would read pages for me,
including one student who was a regular customer at the cleaners. They saved me from being pulled into the discouraging blank pages that I faced occasionally when a scene or an idea about the plot,
the characters, the connections, something, would not work. The experience of writing
The Vulture
was my way of doing the high-wire act blindfolded, knowing that if it didn’t work, if
it wasn’t published, there was no safety net that I could land on and no hole that I could crawl into, no way to face the other folks at Lincoln and no money to go anywhere else.
Since I have lived in the United States of America all of my life, I have seen too many deliberate distortions of events and too many slanted pieces of our history and lives to
feel that I can correct them all or even put a good sized dent into them. All I can say is that if the truth is important to you, understand that most things of value have to be worked for, sought
out, thought about, and brought about after effort worthy of the great value it will add to your life.
It will come at a great price. The time and sweat invested in that pursuit may cost you in hours and days you cannot use in other directions. It may cost you relationships that you would give
almost anything else to develop, with someone who cannot stand to come in second to anything. The passion with which you commit yourself to something intangible may well turn away the very support
that could sustain you.
What you will need is help that exceeds understanding. There may be disruptions on every level by those you try to touch, who shy away from you because understanding is not what you are looking
for. Your only hope for stability on the levels of togetherness beyond understanding is trust. Anyone who claims to love you knows they will not understand every element of these things you need
and that is where trust must carry you two the rest of the way. The truth you are seeking to write about, to sing about, to make sense of for others is something that you pursue not because you
have seen it but because the Spirits tell you it is there.
Quitting my classes altogether in October 1968, at the start of my second year at Lincoln, was one of those moments in time that test how thoroughly you are trusted beyond understanding. It was
one of the active places that all relationships will have to face to overcome before they move securely into love. I hate to get into Oedipus, because most of my life I have driven the wrecks. My
grandmother would have died again when I quit school. But my mother went there with me.
And in April 1969, I had a finished manuscript of
The Vulture
. I had stayed at the university cleaners, sitting in a folding chair in front of an ancient Royal typewriter, and now used
fifteen of my last twenty dollars to get a bus to New York City.
I bluffed my way past a stern, stiff-haired secretary at the front desk of a publishing company and managed to meet the man whose name I had picked up in a magazine—the man who edited
Soul on Ice
by Eldridge Cleaver, which had been published the year before. I lied and told him he had been recommended to me by people “in the organization” and presented him
with the completed copy of my novel and agreed to come back in two weeks.
When that day arrived, I was waved right through the reception area to the editor’s office, where the person I saw was shuffling through a file cabinet with his back to the door. My heart
skipped a beat when I saw my manuscript on his desk. Even upside down, I could read what was written in red ink: ACCEPTED.
I was still trying to look like I was on furlough from “the organization.” I had on a blue dress shirt tucked into pressed black jeans with razor sharp creases under a zippered black
leather jacket. I was carrying an attaché case to look more businesslike than thug. It might have looked like a carrying case for large handguns or a breakdown shotgun, but in it I only had
my shaving kit with personal cosmetics.
He was into business that day. It was just past noon but he was looking end of the day. His tie was loosened and his sleeves were rolled up. There was a cigarette burning in an ash tray that
held a quarter pack of half-smoked butts, crumpled and twisted.
“Hi there, Gil,” he said, dropping another stack of folders on his desk. “Have a seat. I’ve got myself a problem here. A book I thought we had rejected was accepted
somehow and I can’t find the contact information for the author. You know how that goes. So many scripts come through.”
He sat down heavily opposite me at his desk and lit another cigarette. He had a good-sized office with three leather chairs, including his, at angles around a huge ebony desk. With the paperwork
and folders scattered across the desk, the open file cabinets, and the fog of cigarette smoke, I felt like I was in a closet.
“I went to bat for you on this, Gil,” he said, leaning back and making a steeple with his fingers. “It’s interesting, but it’s not at all what we had expected.
We’re handling almost ninety percent nonfiction, especially in, uh, the ethnic arena. A mystery story is a hell of a departure from
Soul on Ice
.”
“We didn’t think it was too smooth to bring you another autobiography right away,” I said with a straight face. “A big chance of getting redundant and getting hung up in
that ‘cry from the ghetto’ crap. You know what I mean? It’s important that we be seen as well-rounded people who like all kinds of music and literature and all.”
“Well,” he said, fingering the corner of my manuscript, “they’re giving me a shot with this on two conditions. Actually three. Number one is that we can agree on an
advance of $2,000.”
With that, he pushed an envelope forward on his desk.
“Number two is that we rewrite all the ghetto-speak dialogue into English. And number three, we need to switch the order of character number two and character number three. Two sounds too
much like one. Do you agree?”
He sat back heavily, trying to read what I was thinking.
I was too shocked to change expressions.
I wasn’t deliberately disguising my feelings with a poker face. I found out later what a good idea that was, but at that moment, sitting across from the editor, I was frozen for a minute.
What I had just heard was like one of the “good news, bad news” jokes that were going around at the time. “The good news is that there’s a check for $2,000. The bad news is
that you have to undergo radical surgery to cash that check.”
I couldn’t remember what I had expected just moments before. The most exciting thing to me was that there was a check right in front of me. A huge check with my name on it. I was excited.
There was more money sitting there than I had ever seen outside of a bank. There was more than three months pay from all three of the summer jobs I’d worked the previous summer getting
together money for Lincoln. That check would cover tuition, room and board, books, everything—even after I gave my mother a 25 percent commission.
The money for the surgery. There must have been a contract somewhere on the desk that would make it official. Cash the check. And what about the surgery? Of the three conditions, two and three
were a drag. But if I could talk this man out of two and three . . .
“You want to change character two and character three,” I said with a question mark hanging off the end of the sentence.
“Well, Junior, character two, is so much like your lead character, Spade. I think the readers will get them crossed. They sound really close in some ways. If you just put three between
them . . .”
“The way that Junior idolized Spade and imitates him and tries so hard to impress him is what I’m playing with,” I told him. “The similarities are intentional. I think if
I separated them, what I was trying to get across would be lost. Plus the whole mystery thing . . .”
“Yeah, you know what?” the editor said, reaching for his cigarettes and giving me a fake smile. “I think our readers are going to be into the ghetto experience more than the
mystery angle. I mean, the opening scene with the body, the murder victim, those documents, ha, those are great literary devices. But what people should be grabbed by is the atmosphere of danger,
that something dangerous could happen at any moment.”