What Makes Jesse Run?

If Atlanta is the capital of the African American Nation in the black-belt South, then Chicago is the capital of black America. Hot is always preferred to cold in the African aesthetic. Yet Chicago is so famous for its bone-shattering, paralyzing cold that it is cited as the site of the African god Oba, whose history transformed him into an icy, death-cold wind, the hawk. And from most accounts, Chicago is his present home.

I mention all this to explain, in part, who Jesse Jackson is and why he is so important. He is, as much as Frederick Douglass was in the 19th Century, the chief spokesman of the African American people. In this sense, whatever Americans make of Jesse, black people are his bone and muscle. He can rise only as high as they are moved.

The only America black people would have any reason to support absolutely would be one in which Jesse Jackson could be elected President. It is clearly his "inelectability" that most obviously identifies the principal defects in U.S. society. The extent to which Jackson, at best, must be shown as some kind of Onyx Quixote is the extent of U.S. social primitivism, the exact measure of the legacy of chattel slavery. But how did Jesse Jackson get to a place in his head where he seriously wanted to be President?

Jackson is rooted in the black-belt South. Born in South Carolina, he went to North Carolina A&T on a football scholarship. He was moved by the dynamic Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the movement for black democratic rights led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the Fifties and Sixties. A combination of the black urban Southern church and the Southern city preacher informed an activism that expanded and symbolized the civil rights movement.

In that sense, Jackson's campaign is a further, mature extension of the Sixties upsurge; it is the extent to which Jackson's fundamental support can be expanded and transformed into focused, popular political and social power that will define its ultimate use to the majority.

•

I am in the Bay Area to speak at Berkeley and Stanford and have heard that Jesse will be in town tonight to address the black Ford-Lincoln-Mercury dealers at San Francisco's Sheraton Palace Hotel.

The dealers sit in rows and are shining clean, polished like brand-new money. Their women dazzle with them. Later tonight, there will be a black-tie dinner dance in the ballroom, where Jesse will give a formal address.

"Dukakis got $13,000,000! Jesse got $1,000,000! What do that look like?" exhorts Bill Shack, a brawny-looking man charged with getting the dealers to fund Jackson's campaign. "Our candidate too poor to reach the people? There are 185 black Ford-Lincoln-Mercury dealers. Jesse Jackson made all of them. It was Jesse carried our statement to Detroit. Got 30 immediately; they promised 320 dealers by 1990. There's 185 now!"

The audience applauds.

"Don't let Jesse be embarrassed in this room. Jesse is not begging--he's fund raising! Who helped found the National Minority Auto Dealers?"

Jesse strides into the hall, surrounded by his entourage--staff and Secret Service--amid jubilant applause. Shack says, "The next President of the United States, Jesse Louis Jackson!"

He seems taller, stronger, more genuinely self-assured. Earlier, I had walked up to him as he headed for the hall. We laughed and embraced like old comrades in struggle.

"I been expecting you," he said. Turning to one of his key allies, a black South African aide and another brother, he said, "This is Baraka. The real Baraka. Where you been?"

"I was supposed to go to Iowa and New Hampshire before, but I thought them white folks would kill me."

"This niggah's crazy!" he laughed. We walked and talked until we reached the doors of the small ballroom. "Get prepared for a victory!" he said.

He is on the stage now, wrapped in the response--the roar his call inspires! "I'm glad to see y'all. Man, I ain't seen this many black folks in a long time!"

"Do I have an ego?" he asks in his speech. "Of course. Would you want a President with an inferiority complex?"

Talking about the dealerships: "It didn't just happen. It was pressured. It was organized. Just to go for Government grants and stuff is OK--it has its place. But the real money is private! And we're locked out of that.

"Doesn't matter how great an apple picker you are--ain't no apples fall, it don't matter!" Laughter, applause. Jesse, speaking to black people, delivers punch line after punch line, each with a profundity that rings clear through his own community--but, as Iowa polls would show by the end of that weekend, not just for black folk. There is a universal note being sounded in the accents and informed rhythms of a specific people, but the truths are so big as to be accessible to a great many people. And finally this is Jackson's danger.

"Never did think the issue was--never was--could we sell cars. Issue was, would Dearborn respect us? You knew you could run a dealership." The grunts of approval run through the crowd. Jackson is politician, preacher, leader. He takes it further: "I believe you could run Ford! I believe I could run America!" Bang! Like that, everybody in the place rises. It must be a religious experience.

Jesse steps back to let the spirit roll over him--then he gets back on it. "If Reagan and Bush had my odds...."

"Whew." The crowd amens.

"I've done the most with the least for the longest period of time!" There is a swirl of truth-cooked ecstasy pushing us. "I'm bicultural--worked on one side of town, lived on the other! I know America better. I negotiated more business deals--from even the lily white. And I did so with integrity--no funny-money deals. I don't expect it. Just great joy watching us grow!"

Yes, it is the political church. It is also call and response from the oldest human correspondence with the greater spirit we all compose.

"Twenty-four years ago, Fannie Lou Hamer couldn't even get a chair at the Atlantic City Democratic Convention. Nineteen sixty-four, being locked out of the convention, with Dr. King trying to get her a seat!

"But you know, if you want to break out of the plantation, the opposition accuses you of being crazy. And the folks who want to stay accuse you of being abnormal, too!

"At the base, it is about economic justice. Fifty-seven corporations made four billion dollars and paid minus four billion in taxes. G.E. made 66 billion and paid no taxes!

"We'll confront Nissan and Toyota. In a real sense, this is you. I'm your horse--you my wagon--together, we gonna get Super Tuesday ... with a force that can win this country! We never had the power to shake the tree ... but now we must be tree shakers. But don't let me shake the tree, then you tell me you got the apples 'cause you got a master's in business administration." Like a parting message, he teaches and warns as he begins to talk about the black national family, how glad he is to see everybody. The kinship and familiarity. We are family.

"But remember Richard Gephardt's rise in the polls; it's because he was spending more money. You see, you've got to afford to run. I can run ... uphill, on ice, and I'm barefooted."

The high has been reached, but even then, in his spontaneous yet practiced way, he is leading the talk into fund raising, and by the time I go out, the dealers are signing $1000 checks.

•

It is later that night at Butler Aviation, where I am supposed to pick up the Jackson party again. Private planes are in repose in all directions, lonely in the cold blue light.

Jesse has been public ever since I've known him. Always moving through a world of near worship as diverse as the disapproval, its necessary dialectic.

But now he is Presidential. There is an excitement to it for real. It would not occur to me until a week later with heavy impact. For real, I had never talked with someone who could be the President!

•

Entering the plane, I can see Jesse stretched out in the first group of seats. A University of Iowa sweat shirt. His feet covered with a coat, bumping up and down to the sound being pumped through the headset of the cassette player. He is listening to Peabo Bryson and rocking back and forth, his head conducting and conducted by the funk.

A black candidate for sure! I had never even thought of an American President listening to music. Reagan wanted to ban the Beach Boys.

The candidate has been brought Chinese food, which he is attacking, still rocking to the music. One earphone pulled away from his ear in deference to his visitor.

There are Secret Service men seated, a couple still standing. Jesse's staff moves quickly, making things ready. We are in the air now, three hours from Des Moines.

I ask my first question again. How had he changed?

"Age, experience, other people's reactions," he says, modifying his Peabo movements, enjoying the food immensely, a hard yellow brightness in the plane peering through blue, cold early-morning glass. "You see your name with the Pope, Ted Kennedy, Billy Graham, Kissinger and me. Kissinger didn't stay on there long!

"A white American male on a list like that--he might run for governor or President. A white fellow I know--he's not even a racist, just a guy--told me I couldn't (continued on page 152)What Makes Jesse Run?(continued from page 76) even run for governor. Now, whenever he sees me, he laughs, 'One of my mistakes.'"

The change in Jackson has registered, has, in fact, been partially the result of this registration.

"What do white people really think--about me running?" He is paraphrasing me, his head still rocking.

"Well, they know they can trust me to do certain things. They will come to me for help." He hands me his can of soda so it won't spill, still scooping the Chinese food relentlessly.

"White folks all over the world want their people, for instance. A family with a son in Angola. His parents came to me. 'Can you get him out?'

"This guy blew up an oil field in Cabinda. His mother asked me to get a CARE package into Angola. Couldn't turn to the U.S. Government or even other white folks. At least to get him a letter and a CARE package. I did. They let him go.

"Holtzman [the district attorney] in Brooklyn called me when I was going to Syria. They think there's some Nazi holed up there--Brunner or something. She wanted to know if I could ask [President Hafez] Assad."

My wife had told me of Jesse's speech at the Kenosha, Wisconsin, Chrysler plant. Jackson is now recalling it. The mayor of Kenosha had gone to Jesse. "Jesse to the rescue," Jackson says, chuckling. "They desperate. They know I'll try to help them." Jackson's easy Southland-black speech warming to the image, the Chinese food almost completely "wore out."

He had talked to the black auto dealers about the closing of the plant, too, but also about Lee Iacocca, the biggest name in auto executives. "We have the numbers to win!" he had roared. "I'm coming out of Iowa with double digits! The issue in 1988 is economic! Iacocca closed Chrysler in Kenosha--after making a five-year commitment to those people, then closing it within a year!" The black dealers had gone wild. "If somebody gave you a two-billion-dollar loan with no-strike clauses and all the rest of that stuff--you'd have to be a genius to fail!"

Again, the roof had come off. Black people have loved Jesse for quite a while. They would do pretty much what he asked them--to the extent that they could or could understand they could. But now it has been dawning on them that Jesse is the best candidate. And a black candidate!

"We must stop behaving like giants with grasshopper complexes!" he had told the auto dealers. "I don't duck lawn mowers and big feet!

"They ask me, Are people ready for me? I tell them, They ready for you! If Colin Powell can be National Security Advisor, if Oprah Winfrey can be the number-one talk-show host, if Cosby can be the number-one TV show...."

His "Think about it!" had come like a surfer's confirming prayer atop the roaring wave of the happy crowd.

By now, Jesse has iced all edibles, drunk the soda and is animated by our conversation and the recall it stimulates.

"It was funny--the mayor of Kenosha is up there pouring his heart out for me, 'cause I had helped them. 'Jesse to the rescue.' He got so high up in it he said, 'Jesse to the rescue. He's going to throw a spear in our enemies' hearts!'" Jesse is rolling now with laughter.

"He didn't realize what he was saying. It was funny. A spear! But he went to Iowa that night. 'I can't tell you how to vote. But here's a man who'll help you when you're backed against the wall!'

"There were [white] truck drivers, family farmers feeling that when your back is to the wall, the only somebody they can call on is me. And they know they're doing it with great defiance!"

"I've had more trouble with the liberals," he had told me earlier in San Francisco while we were walking together to a press conference. "If somebody asks if they want a black President, then you know you got to run through all that history of black and white and all that. But if the definition is functional, like 'Do you want a President who can get jobs, eliminate the deficit, bring the U.S. economy back to life, give us a rational foreign policy?' then after getting a yes to all those, you say, 'You mind if he's black?'"

"We wanted to air a commercial in Iowa," he says now, "but we couldn't afford it. Three white guys are sitting on a bench. A. says, 'I like Jesse Jackson.' B. says, 'But he's black!' C. says, 'I like Jesse Jackson. He seems to understand the family farmer.' B. again: 'But he's black.' C. says, 'But the guy who took my farm is white!'"

Again, the cleansing laughter as we wing high up in the cold night toward another day of campaigning in Iowa. A day closer to the primaries.

"Should we have a black quarterback for the Super Bowl? That's a race-based question rather than a function-based question. Should we have a quarterback who can throw four touchdowns in one quarter?" he had asked the black car-dealer audience, thinking of Doug Williams' record-smashing performance against Denver at this year's Super Bowl. "Two years ago, the [Chicago] Bears played the [Washington] Redskins. It could have been Doug Williams, but it was Doug Flutie vs. the Redskins. The best quarterback in the stadium was over on the bench. The Bears chose Flutie over Williams and lost. America's gonna keep losing big games. Making the same kind of choices!" The crowd's laughter had been stunning. "Don't be choosing no Dukakis and DuFluties."

Jackson, on stage or close up, has made wondrous growth. He has always been a crowd pleaser stageside, but there is a deeper resolve, a more fundamental feeling for the intellectual commitment he made long ago. Plus, it is clear he does his homework. He knows what he is talking about, where he is coming from. What he wants from everyone.

"Mondale won the nomination with 6,700,000 votes! Hart had 6,200,000, Jackson 3,500,000. He won with 6,700,000 popular votes. In November 1984, blacks alone gave Mondale 10,000,000. We had the numbers but not the mentality! Gucci clothes and inferiority complexes. You can't have it if you can't see it!

"Blacks have 13,000,000 registered voters! Seven million unregistered blacks. Can we win?"

In his speech, the moving, deep rhythms of his preacher-trained cadence had raised the audience, informing them and warming them.

"Can we win? We're running number one among white family farmers in North Carolina! We're number one in New York and California, Maryland, Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Texas!"

By now, they had risen to their feet. "We can win. Not just run--but, honest to God, sho 'nuff, win!"

•

In the calm silence of the late-night flight back to Des Moines, the deeply thoughtful, relentlessly self-measuring side of Jackson's personality stands clear. He is trying, nevertheless, to rest. Our conversation is not low, not loud, but steady. The aides drifting off to sleep and the weary Secret Service men probably hear our whoops of occasional laughter.

As Jesse has pressed even harder and with more expertise to reach all parts of the electorate, it has become obvious that the media establishment has determined to nix him. So that after the initial titillation and darky sensationalism, the press has blanked on him.

It would seem that the Newsweek cover was the signal to blank on him openly and blatantly. He searches the Iowa daily papers from one end to the other--there is not one mention of his name two days before the primary. The other candidates cavort effortlessly in multiple exposures. Jackson's acknowledgment of this racist attack sounds like a dark grunt in tune with the night we shot through. "Now they gonna cut me out. We gettin' too close. They gonna cut me out!"

A week later, a spectacular piece of racist nonreporting would leap at me wordlessly from the pages of the February 15th New York magazine. There are photographs of all the candidates, Democrat and Republican, arranged like a checkerboard. All are there except Jackson. And in a center box, where his photo should be, there is a caption that reads, "Do you know these men? If not, stay tuned!"

"I know more about foreign policy," he had said in his San Francisco speech. "We came here on the foreign policy." Some of the black audience had almost fallen out of their seats.

"I brought Goodman home without a cake and a Bible [referring to the Syrian rescue and Reagan's Iran/Contra scandal]. I know more about the Third World, because I grew up in it! The world is mostly Third World! There are 400,000,000 Latins next to us! It's foolish to cut deals with 15,000 Contras and miss out on 400,000,000.

"The real world is young, brown, black, yellow and female. If you have color shock when you see different colors, you not ready--definitely not ready--to be President. We got five children at home--five different colors, and nobody is shook up. It takes up no energy in our house. We must have a world view consistent with the real world! Don't just stop Contra aid in Nicaragua; do it in Angola. Inconsistency in Angola makes moral judgment impossible in Nicaragua!"

Remembering the speech, we chuckle. I'd told him when I got on the plane that he should go to sleep when he felt like it. "I am," he had said, laughing. He isn't sleepy yet, but against the Peabo animation, fatigue has begun to inch its numbing choreography. But he is still "on it."

I ask him about his own development. His handling of the issues. How had he come to see things in such a way?

"All those things we were doing in the Sixties and Seventies--I never stopped." He is proud, but that is not what moved the words. He wants me to know, to feel his efforts, not just politically but in terms of continuing to educate himself through participation in the greatest of all schools, the world of conscious struggle! The "in" jokes, exchanges of old brothers in struggle, give the dialog a life that prolongs it past the normal physical weariness and emotional letdown between public appearances. The press white-out bothers him; no matter. Is he taking his own constituency for granted? I ask, repeating some media and public opinion. His answer is, by far, the sharpest of all reactions to any question.

"That's a simplistic statement and an inaccurate one! I go South every week. I've got support from 20 black Congresspersons. I've got black support because I've worked for it!

"Last week, Newsweek had a story on me. 'White staff surrounding Jackson.' Trying to do the same thing. I called 'em up and cussed 'em out! They had dropped a photo of the Rainbow. I've got blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos. Eddie Wong and Willie Barrow work together! I've got the only staff where Arabs and Jews work together!

"Then Newsweek quotes some black woman who works for Gephardt. My line is, I got the most American staff going! We're number one in North Carolina! Both Rosa Parks and Billy Carter endorsed me. I asked them at Newsweek, 'Why do you guys play these games?'"

What about some of our old brothers in struggle? I ask him. We throw a few names around, their alliances and unity agreements. Their criticism of him, for that matter. What does he think about those, for instance, who accuse him of not going far enough?

"I always have one foot in the status quo and one foot ahead." He likens his method to the teachings of Jesus, pointing out the obvious and the occult in what Jesus said and did. "I'm a work horse, not a show horse! I'm connected to where the people are. A horse not connected to the people is a show horse, not a work horse. All our experience points to this. 'No cross, no crown!' Our struggles for development make us stronger. Hegel just used big words. 'Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.'

"We don't do what we used to do. Don't make the same mistakes. I try to approach the people where they are and take them somewhere else. I'm trying to get better, not bitter!"

Yet the need for a broad united front, a rainbow of all nationalities and cross ideologies, including a broad mass movement of the African American people, is hardly lost on him.

"But I'm not interested in being too close to these people whose whole projection is just talking bad about white folks. The folks they got cheering for them are not the majority. Most black folks got to go to work the next day and they not interested in all that!"

Of the danger he courts by being in the eye of the hurricane--a black Presidential candidate with a real chance of winning--he shrugs.

"They got a month to stop me."

His mind is wandering over the killing campaign schedule as his metabolism begins to slow even more with fatigue. Still, his eyes are flashing, the athletic energy undeniable.

"After Super Tuesday, we go into Illinois. If I get the same vote Harold [Washington] got, we can take it! We can win Illinois, California, New York!" He is slowing even more.

"Hey, man," he blurts, half laughing, "you got to leave me alone now!" A few more words and he is out.

As the plane darts in blue light toward Des Moines, I get up and go to the john. Only one Secret Service man, strapped down every which way, remains awake. When I go back down the aisle, he is spread in front of the pilot's compartment as if to stop a mad writer from hijacking the iron bird.

•

I hear Jesse bouncing around before my eyes open. We are moments from Des Moines. He is wearing the headset, shifting energetically to Peabo's funk.

"Baraka, you need to stay up here over the weekend. You'll really see something! Man, ain't no black writers been around here to do nothing. They need to be more aggressive. But you the person can do it."

He is pulling up toward the top of his energy scale again. I am making excuses. I have to go to Maryland and Philadelphia. It's Black History Month!

"This is black history, man. You can get close up. See black history being made!"

It is tempting. Not just tempting, it makes me feel almost like I am turning my back on real historical responsibility. Jesse keeps up the request, demand, order, like a brother asking for help.

"These liberals always saying white folks are so irreversibly damaged by racism they can't even partially recover. I don't believe that.

"I'm not willing to accept some 70-year-old mailman's recall of some unscientific garbage he learned in school, when it's the postmaster creating the damage."

He drags Jimmy the Greek into it.

"I don't know if they breed strong ballplayers. But they did breed a President!"

Jesse is still at me to stay as the door opens and the violent blue cold smacks me in the face. The sun is promising east of the airport.

A van is waiting for us. His campaign staff and Secret Service men are following. We head for the Holiday Inn, a few miles from the airport.

Jesse is on a balcony over the pool inside the hotel. I stand next to him as he tries to persuade me to stay on. To capture an indelible moment of American history. For a few minutes, I am persuaded.

The Secret Service men on duty must linger while Jesse talks. Staff members come by and speak. One white couple relates a poll measured by toilet flushes that Dukakis has won. It is about six in the icy Iowa morning.

"I implore you, Baraka," Jesse says, more serious than I care to hear. He goes over it again. You can see the strain, but also the heroic determination--to do! Stats, fire, laughter, a genuine need.

Finally, we part, and he calls over his shoulder then, asking the South African staff member to get me a room.

I am with him even more as he disappears to get another hour of sleep, perhaps, then up to confront white Iowa, white America.

But I have promises to keep. Both of us do. Jesse Jackson's are monumental. I have been with a giant, there is no doubt in my mind. But I make my excuses to the South African and, almost moist around the eyes, make my cold departure.

"Jesse can win." I speak softly but aloud. Another brother, the driver, grabs my bags.