1/1 - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell University

Ken McClane has a touch of the
preacher about him. If you let
him talk long enough—which,
in truth, is not a challenge—
he will eventually get around
to love. Love for his parents. Love
for all those talented and not-so-talented
young writers who are his students.
And, curiously, love for strangers.
"I want to hug everyone I meet,"
he says, with what seems the giddy
innocence of a child who does not yet
know that people can hurt him.
But McClane knows pain, and he
loves deeply. For if it is essential to
"never forget" the horror that humans
inflict on others, McClane
stands for the belief that it is also essential
never to forget their kindness,
generosity and vulnerability.
Surely, though, one might hear
I-want-to-love-everyone talk today
and feel an uncontrollable urge to
dismiss it as '60s-speak: Done that,
been there, forget it. Life is too hard.
That's when it is time to bring the
talk down a notch and consider the
story of Kenneth A. McClane, W. E.
B. DuBois professor of literature, BA
73, MA 74, MFA 76, and author of
eight books of poems and Walls:
Essays 1985-1990.
Born in Harlem in 1951,
McClane, 42, is the grandson of a
preacher. His father was a doctor, his
mother an artist. As professionals,
they were an unusual family for that
HI LDRETH/CORNELL
FACULTY
Harlem to Ithaca
WRITER KEN
MCCLANE SAYS
LOVE HAS
EVERYTHING TO
DO WITH IT
time and
place. People
asked, Why
don't you move out of the ghetto?
They, after all, were among the few
who could. But people who live in
Harlem need their own doctors, too,
McClane's father said. And so they
stayed.
The second of three children,
McClane was, beyond measure, the
most fortunate. When his older sister,
Adrienne, was born, she was
unable to breathe for 12 minutes, and
was left with a lifelong mental handicap.
Today, at 57, she is in a special
home, where she is reminded to turn
off the stove and put out her cigarette.
When McClane's younger
brother, Paul, was 6, he had his first
run-in with the police. He was hauled
down to the precinct and questioned
about stealing a woman's wallet. He
was innocent but the incident was
harmful all the same. It gave birth to
a hatred of police, authority and
whites, his brother recalls. And the
implications of a hatred as big as that
are enormous, as James Baldwin, one
of McClane's favorite authors, has
written: "In order really to hate white
people, one has to blot so much out
of the mind—and the heart—that this
CORNELL MAGAZINE
14
hatred itself becomes
an exhausting
and
self-destructive pose." At 29, Paul
McClane drank himself to death.
In contrast, when Ken was a boy
he got on a subway every morning
and left Harlem to attend Collegiate
School, the nation's oldest and one
of its most prestigious prep schools.
He was the only black, and only the
second ever, to attend. It was another
unusual privilege for a young black
man from Harlem. "I've said all I had
to do is keep breathing and I would
have been okay," he says. "I believe
if one goes to the kinds of schools I
did, you don't stand up and say, Ί
worked hard.' Millions of people
work hard, and no one notices. The
wonderful thing about privilege is
you get recognition."
He also boasts luck in love, where
it counts first and, perhaps, most. He
effuses about the love his parents
showed him, suggesting there was
safety, there was nearly everything,
in that—including the seed of a desire
to give back, wherever love
would be taken.
But this, of course, is what
McClane can say more than 20 years
after leaving Harlem for Ithaca, a