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FACULTY
place of indescribable contrast to
127th Street. While still in Harlem,
he was angry and arrogant and anxious
to get out, to get away from the
pimps and the numbers runners, the
streets of broken glass and the
"hopeless playgrounds," as he writes
in an essay, "From a Higher Bush."
"Knowing little, but intuiting
much, I knew I needed to get out of
the city," he writes. "Harlem was
killing me—it was killing others, too,
but I was not being generous. . . /
didn't want to die. I wasn't thinking,
I was running. And so I left Harlem—
at the earliest chance—to go on to
college, where I would understand—
albeit painfully—what I had truly left
behind." That is, he saw the light
back there in the ghetto, in the acts
of love and the gestures of hope.
It was 1969 when McClane came
to Cornell as a student, attracted
by the takeover of Willard
Straight Hall by black student activists
a few
months earlier. "This
was a place that was "I AM HERE
painfully understanding
how truly great BECAUSE OTHERS
the gulf was between
blacks and whites; it CARED; THEY LOVED
was in the middle of
ME. YOU ARE HERE
it," he says.
Still, it was a BECAUSE OTHERS
"middle of it" that
was safer than the LOVED YOU: THEY
middle of it he had
been in. And Cornell KEPT YOU WHOLE,
proved fertile ground NO ONE CAN LIVE
for him. As a professor,
he has been on WITHOUT OTHERS;
the fast track: He
joined the faculty as WE ARE, BY FATE
an assistant profes- AND INSTINCT,
sor when he earned
the MFA in 1976, be- INTERCONNECTED."
came an associate
professor in 1983, a
full professor in 1989 and was named
to an endowed professorship in 1992.
As a writer, he has been steadily publishing
new works: His first collection
of poetry, Running Before the
Winds, came out while he was still
an undergraduate. After this followed
Out Beyond the Bay, Moons and Low
Times, To Hear the River, At Winter's
End, These Halves are Whole and Take ing."
Five: Collected Poems, 1971-1986, the
CORNELL MAGAZINE
16
first in a series on contemporary
black poets edited by Henry Louis
Gates Jr., the former W. E. B. DuBois
professor of literature at Cornell, who
is now at Harvard.
Then McClane opened a new
chapter in his writing life. Prompted
by a need to understand the death of
his brother, he turned to essays as a
form that would allow him to ask,
Why? and try to answer it. The essay,
"Walls," which became the title
of his collection, was selected for inclusion
in The Best American Essays
1988.
He thought he would return to
poetry after that. But the autobiographical
urge has continued, and
he's now working on a second collection
of essays. In this book, he
writes of his sister's handicap, his
parents' suffering from Alzheimer's
disease, the racism his family encountered,
a meeting with Martin
Luther King Jr. and a visit to an upstate
prison, where he was invited to
give a commence-
ment talk to inmates
in a college
degree program.
Like so many writers,
McClane says
he does what he
does to better understand
life, to reveal
again what is
often taken for
granted. And it is in
this process, too,
that he always
comes around again
to his trademark
topic.
"For if I have
learned anything—
in the death of my
brother and in the
recent decline in
both my mother
and father—it is
that we are each other's witness," he
writes in the introduction to the new
collection. "I am here because others
cared; they loved me. You are
here because others loved you: they
kept you whole. No one can live without
others; we are, by fate and instinct,
interconnected. . . And it is
love, which is really life's only mean-
—Lisa Bennett