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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
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