I wrote my first opinion column for the St. Louis American in August of 2014, when then managing editor Chris King, asked me to write a reaction piece to the killing of Michael Brown by former Ferguson police officer Darren Walker. After my retirement from St. Louis County government in January of 2015, and at Dr. Suggs’ invitation, I became a member of the American’s editorial board and a regular contributor to the paper’s Editorial Page. From 2015 to 2021, I averaged about 24-26 columns a year. The last column I wrote for the St. Louis American was December 1, 2021, to be exact.
After seven years of regularly writing a political column, it felt to me that I was repeating myself. Commenting on the Black experience in America had become a Groundhog Day movie, where the same things happen, for the same reasons, all the time. If I was going to continue to write in the St. Louis American– to continue to be a Black writer, on a Black platform, writing for a Black audience, I needed to find some new perspective, or at least a deeper insight. I didn’t know what I had to say that I hadn’t already said. Dr. Suggs disagreed. He said I had a lot more to say, and there was a whole lot more that needed to be said. But he did what he has done consistently over our 50 plus years of friendship; he gave me the room to figure it out.
I’m not a fan of America’s current political commentariat — too many people, who know too little, with too much to say, and with too many opportunities to say it! I really think political writers and pundits, especially those who write opinion columns in newspapers, should follow the guidance of serious jazz musicians regarding improvised solos. If you have nothing to say, then don’t play anything; if you’ve said it before, why are you saying it again? No one has expressed this better than Thelonious Monk, “Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by… The same is true for political writing.
With Monk’s advice in mind, I took a page from another seminal jazz icon, Sonny Rollins, and took a sabbatical from writing the column. In 1959, at the top of his game, Rollins stopped performing, and spent the next 2 years practicing 12- 14 hours a day on the Williamsburg Bridge in lower Manhattan (so he wouldn’t disturb his neighbors). Why did he do it? “What made me withdraw and go to the bridge was how I felt about my own playing…I knew I was dissatisfied,” he said. I know the feeling. So, like Sonny Rollins, I took a sabbatical, and like him I didn’t go on vacation, I worked on my game. My approach to writing was a function of my understanding (or misunderstanding) of how I supposed any artistpainter, sculptor, or serious musician, approached their work. I presumed the reaction of the audience to the work has no relationship to the vision of the artist that produces it. I would have said the work is about the artist’s vision, how the audience responds is not germane to why the work exists. But I was wrong (or at least not totally right), as much as an artist is compelled to say it, the reason for the work to exist, is there’s an audience that needs to hear it, see it and read it.
What did I learn on “the bridge?” You can’t separate what you wrote or played then from what you’re writing or playing now. Your past informs your present. You make a lot of records, you write a lot of columns, the public can’t remember everything you’ve done. The question is how do you integrate what you’ve done with what you’re doing, to make your body of work a coherent whole and not a collection of random, episodic political observations.
I learned the difference between repetition and redundancy. There are only 12 notes in Western music. Whether you are Beethoven or Ellington, Mozart, or Monk, 12 notes are all you got to work with. But those 12 notes are repeated an infinite number of times, in an infinite number of patterns, to create an infinite amount of new music. The same is true in political or social theory. There are only so many ideas. I came to realize writing a political column is like the improvised jazz solo. It’s of this moment, it’s not always original, but it doesn’t have to be redundant. The space in The American that my columns and that of other writers have occupied may be captioned “As I See It,” which is most appropriate for an occasional op-ed opinion piece. But as I thought about what I had written over the last seven years, and why I wrote it, I concluded I wasn’t writing an occasional op-ed opinion column, responding to a political or cultural event of the moment.
Reflection has two meanings in the dictionary. The first, throwing back by a body or surface light, heat, or sound without absorbing it. The second is serious thought and consideration. What I was attempting to do was discern if events of the moment had any larger implications or significant historical connection. So that you’ll always know what you’re reading is not some casual opinion. With permission of The American, my future columns will be called “On Further Reflection.
