Ancestral Imperatives
. . . that the improvisation that is the ancestral imperative of blues procedure is completely consistent with and appropriate to those of the frontiersman, the fugitive slave, and the picaresque hero, the survival of each of whom depended largely on an ability to operate on dynamics equivalent to those of the vamp, the riff, and most certainly the break, which jazz musicians regard as the Moment of Truth, or that disjuncture that should bring out your personal best.
—Albert Murray, The Blue Devils of Nada
As leaders, who are you inspired by? Who are your heroes and heroines, your representative archetypes? Who do you consider exemplars of your own ancestral lineage? Such questions point to the intent of our inquiry today.
In my post last week, I recalled my encounter with Cornel West at Harvard in September 2019. In the spirit of antagonistic cooperation, I declared to him that following through on his promise to write a “meditation” comparing and contrasting Anton Chekhov and John Coltrane’s work was an “Ancestral Imperative.”
I wanted my words to resonate beyond my individual voice to the ancestors I feel that West and I hold in common, including yet transcending our tie as members of an ethnic tribe once called Negro Americans.
Such shared ancestry extends beyond race into a universe of influences such as the European concert, chamber, and orchestral tradition as well as the Afro-American musical cosmos; the writings of great thinkers and philosophers across time; and the many thousands gone, including the unnamed and unrecorded downhome folks who sacrificed their very lives to fight for freedom beyond the bounds of race, color, creed, or previous condition of servitude.
A Distinction Between Relatives and Ancestors
A few weeks ago, Jewel and I gave a short presentation at the annual Harlem YMCA golf outing. Our board member Gregg Walker sponsored the event’s dinner under the Jazz Leadership Project (JLP) banner, so we took ten minutes under the tent to share our jazz-based leadership and team development model, as the evening sun gave way to the moonlit sky. But technical troubles arose. Fortunately, an American “ancestral imperative”—a term that I first learned of from Albert Murray in passages such as the epigraph above—is the ability to improvise through unexpected shifts and changes.
Though it wasn’t a part of our prepared script, I began to riff on a historical fact that involved an ancestor I revere, Ralph Ellison. In the summer of 1936, Ellison came to New York City from Tuskegee Institute to make some money for his senior year tuition. On his second day in the Big Apple, Ellison ran into Alain Locke, the “father” of the Harlem Renaissance, who was in conversation with the renowned Harlem poet Langston Hughes—in the lobby of the Harlem YMCA, then just three years old.
Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes
Running into Locke and Hughes at the Harlem Y was serendipitous. Ellison had met Locke on the Tuskegee campus just that spring. Once Locke excused himself, Hughes, a fellow midwesterner (Ellison, Oklahoma; Hughes, Missouri), generously gave Ellison advice and pointed him toward key social and artistic connections. Hughes also lent Ellison copies of books by the French author Andre Malraux. When Malraux visited the states the following February for lectures to raise funds for the Loyalist forces fighting fascism in Spain, Ellison was in the audience.
I had never dreamed that I would be in the presence of Malraux, of whose work I became aware on my second day in Harlem when Langston Hughes suggested that I read Man’s Fate and Days of Wrath before returning them to a friend of his. And it is this fortuitous circumstance which led to my selecting Malraux as a literary “ancestor,” whom, unlike a relative, the artist is permitted to choose.
—Ralph Ellison, “Hidden Name and Complex Fate”
The distinction between an artist choosing an ancestor versus being born as a familial or idiomatic relative was to my knowledge first made by Ellison in 1963 during a heated exchange with literary critic Irving Howe. Ellison, in “The World and the Jug,” explained that while Richard Wright and Langston Hughes were his literary relatives, Malraux, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, and Hemingway were his “ancestors.” Since many view reality through the grainy, shadowy lens of race rather than the clean, well-lighted resolution of culture, they might assume that Ellison chose such literary masters because they were racialized as white.
As usual, such a lens is narrow and small, reducing inner human complexity and aspiration to external physical characteristics and racial presumption.
As Ellison explained:
Do you still ask why Hemingway was more important to me than Wright? Not because he was white, or more “accepted.” But because he appreciated the things of this earth which I love and which Wright was too driven or deprived or inexperienced to know: weather, guns, dogs, horses, love and hate and impossible circumstances which to the courageous and dedicated could be turned into benefits and victories. Because he wrote with such precision about the processes and techniques of daily living that I could keep myself and my brother alive during the 1937 Recession by following his descriptions of wing-shooting; because he knew the difference between politics and art and something of their true relationship for the writer. Because all that he wrote—and this is very important—was imbued with a spirit beyond the tragic with which I could feel at home, for it was very close to the feeling of the blues, which are, perhaps, as close as Americans can come to expressing the spirit of tragedy.
Who Are Your Ancestors?
Dr. Mae C. Jemison
As Ellison considered literary icons beyond his idiomatic kinfolk to be ancestors, I consider examples beyond my being a male. The achievements of astronaut Mae Jemison and the first Essence magazine editor-in-chief Susan Taylor were very inspirational to me during my 20s, and remain so. Going back in history, the enterprising example of Madame C. J. Walker stoked my entrepreneurial passions, which were first ignited by my father, Horace Thomas Jr. The courage of Harriet Tubman and Ida B. Wells fired up my own desire for justice and bravery amid the challenges of life—whether based on race or otherwise.
I’ve even considered fictional characters to be ancestral influences. In my essay, “The Power of the Feminine,” I explain why I identified with the character Paul Atriedes of the sci-fi masterpiece Dune.
. . . he, like me, was young, and coming into an understanding of his powers. Those powers were based on the mental and physical training he underwent as a young prince.
Part of that training was in the mysterious ways of the Bene Gesserit, an exclusive sisterhood whose members underwent years of arduous work to develop capacities of mind and body that others in the Dune fictional universe considered magical. A key aspect of Bene Gesserit initiation was the drinking of a substance to undergo the “spice agony,” where veils of time and lineage are torn asunder, revealing generations of female ancestral knowledge. But Bene Gesserit legend told of a male who would undergo the initiation, a Kwisatz Haderach who would tap into female and male ancestral lines.
Paul Atreides drank the spice, survived the ordeal, and tapped into both ancestral lines!
The lesson for me, as a young man of 22 or 23, was that true power lay in tapping into one’s masculine and feminine qualities.
We’re born with relatives, those in our family line through kinship and ethnic identification. But we can choose our ancestors as we strive to make life swing as fine art. Among jazz alto saxophonists, for instance, in addition to my adoration for the aesthetic majesty of Benny Carter, Charlie Parker, and Cannonball Adderley, I consider Paul Desmond and Phil Woods my ancestors, as my love for their styles and soulful playing transcended the realm of race. The way their music entered my soul, warmed my heart, and opened my chakras helped me center on culture over race.
Similar to exercises in which we engage our participants during live JLP workshops, we suggest reflecting on our theme, in this case “ancestral imperatives.” Make a mental (or written) note as to what the phrase means to you, and examples of the ancestors that motivate your leadership.
As I wrote in my afterword to Murray Talks Music, I consider it my ancestral imperative to “make the old folks . . . those who have laid down blood, sweat, and tears to make it possible for you to be alive, and, hopefully, to thrive, proud of you. To fulfill the dreams of generations gone by so that their values will live on and be enacted by what you strive to achieve and actually accomplish. To do the level best you can so that your ancestors would say: Well done.”